> Unfortunately now the normal rate of doing tasks, like listing a
directory or editing a file have all but stopped.
> >
> > {How much swap is in use when this happens?}
> >
> > 92k so obviously almost no swap is involved.
{ This is very odd. Can you try pausing the cp process temporarily (^Z)
to see if your system becomes more responsive? }
I did so, and I was able to regain control and normal execution rate of my
commands almost instantly.
{ If it does, then it could be that it is really an I/O issue.}
Unfortunately I could NOT restart that job even though I knew the pid.
{ Are you connecting to this system remotely? Are you copying to/from a
network drive? }
The drive is a SATA drive which plugs into the motherboard via a SATA
backplane. This is an expensive Supermicro 7046GT-TRF motherboard.
{ There's a possibility that cp or a library it depends on has a memory
leak, but I would find this unusual.}
Unfortunately after killing the job and then killing the shell script that
was running the cp commands, "top" shows
top - 20:04:44 up 2:04, 4 users, load average: 0.33, 1.75, 3.05
Mem: 24733672k total, 24447148k used, 286524k free, 314712k buffers
Swap: 25165812k total, 1040k used, 25164772k free, 22884668k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
--------------------------------------------------------------------
So there is no load on the system, but almost all the memory got taken away
and it is not being returned as one would expect.
I am not sure what to think, but for my motherboard and version of linux,
there definitely appears to be a problem with the "cp" executable.
However there are more important things to tackle than this, but it was so
odd that I decided to post about it. Enough said.
- Randall
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