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

[Bob McElrath <mcelrath draal physics wisc edu>]

On Tue, 1 Dec 1998, Greg Lindahl wrote:

> 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.

It's undoubtedly reading files...  I don't know where to look to find free
pages but /proc/sys/vm/freepages gives:

(0)<mcelrath@draal:/home/mcelrath> cat /proc/sys/vm/freepages
256     512     768

at all times (while the program is running) -- the numbers never change.
(Is that supposed to be RAM	SWAP	VM there?)

In top, the "free" swap field is always exactly 512M - "used".

> > 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.

There was a mail to this list today saying that there were some serious
enhancements to the adaptec drivers that appeared in 2.0.36.  Might be worth
a try.

-- Bob

Bob McElrath (mcelrath@draal.physics.wisc.edu) Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison