Re: Unable to load interpreter // VM thrashing or hardware ???

[Greg Lindahl <lindahl cs virginia edu>]

> > (3) The old panacea of setenv MEMORY_SIZE 252 doesn't help either
> 
> What does this have to do with problems of a 256MB malloc?

It was a workaround for a MILO bug on machines with 128 or 256 megs of
ram. The symptom was a freeze. Clearly not relevant here.

> Watching with top, I can see that during your "Testing..." phase the swap
> increases dramatically.  On my machine it goes up to ~300MB.  During
> "Filling..." it drops to ~128MB.  I have about 50MB of other apps running at
> the same time.  I don't know why it would use 300MB of swap, but if you only
> have 2x136M, this is clearly where your problem lies.  (I have 512MB swap --
> most people recommend to have twice as much swap as you have RAM).

Don't be confused by this. Your machine may also be reading files and
whatnot, which means that your swap usage is higher than his. His
total available VM is 256+256; yours is 256+512. The correct
diagnostic is make sure that swap is not full, and then to look at the
free pages.

> I have an LX 533MHz, 256MB RAM, 512MB swap space, BusLogic BT-958
> (UltraWide, with IBM Ultrastar disk), RH 5.1 install, but kernel 2.1.129.

Note just 1 swap partition. I wonder if the UX had just one. The
machines that fail have 2. Also note adaptec. In the 2.0.35 kernel,
which the failing system has, the adaptec driver is fubar, definitely
fubar for multiple disks.

-- g