Brian Long wrote:
Leos, This was a problem in the original RHEL 3 settings for /proc/sys/vm/pagecache. In one of the updates, Red Hat changed the defaults to "1 15 100" (I forget the original defaults). Have you tried re-enabling swap with U6? Because of this VM setting, the newer kernels should not exhibit the behavior you describe. /Brian/
Brian,this server has the settings "1 15 100" there, it is running kernel 2.4.21-20.ELsmp and has uptime 183 days. I am sure that the kernel is exactly the one which showed that bad behaviour I described and caused many outages to our service. I am not sure about the settings in /proc/sys/vm/pagecache, but I think that they were not changed from their default. One correction to my original message: this server has 4 GB RAM, not 2 GB RAM. Right now I cannot experiment with this server, because it runs fine and I couldn't justify any outages for the very important services running there. If we would do anything there, we would install RHEL 4 on another server and switch our services there. I am sorry, but this is a 24x7 production environment and we have no room for experiments...
Leos