Re: Wierd disk/load/process error...

[Christopher Curtis <ccurtis ee fit edu>]

On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Jeff Sturm wrote:

> I have observed severe memory consumption by Lynx when downloading
> binary files.  Lynx seems to try to copy the entire file in memory.
> Was your disk thrashing?  How much swap do you have?  Run "free" the
> next time you try the download and I suspect you will see the problem.

There was no noticable disk thrashing, but I wouldn't have noticed it
anyway - the hard drive is well hidden.  Total swap space being used was
up to about 7MB when I reset the machine, out of a total of over 600MB
swap (I wasn't sure if I found an egcs bug or if it really needed that
much memory).  But I was done with lynx.  The file download was complete
and it locked up when I tried to do a "save".  That's when I first noticed
it, because it hung, presumably trying to copy the file.  I figured no big
deal, I'll kill the process and copy it by hand, which I found that I
couldn't do.  I'm not sure if this was when the load started to increase,
or if it was before.  After the reboot and two manual fsck's, I copied the
file a-ok and I think it untarred fine, though I can't be sure if I
actually untarred it or just tested it... anyhow.

Thanks,
--
Christopher Curtis               - http://www.ee.fit.edu/users/ccurtis
Florida Institute of Technology  - System Administrator, Programmer
Melbourne, Florida  USA          - http://www.lp.org/