Re: RHEL 4 improvement in use of swap? (compared to RHEL 3)

["Stephen J. Smoogen" <smooge gmail com>]

On 10/31/05, robert infotility com <robert infotility com> wrote:
> Quoting "Stephen J. Smoogen" <smooge gmail com>:
>
> > The system has too little real memory for your tasks. The only thing
> > that RHEL-4 might have done is kill your memory hog application better
> > than the RHEL-3 kernel would. You are needing around 1 GB of real ram
> > if you want to do both Mozilla, java and a big compile without too
> > much swap time.
>
> Others have reported the same symptoms on systems with
> much greater real memory, so I doubt if lack of real memory
> has anything to do with it.
>
> This box has chugged along happily for months at a time.
> The problem is that under poorly defined circumstances
> (one author in this thread reported that certain grep
> commands is a trigger) swapping completely takes over
> all resources. The evidence is that this can happen
> despite the quantity of real memory.
>
> Robert Dodier
>

Well I cant replicate it on my systems unless I have less than 384 MB
of ram. At that point various commands sizes on say kernel builder are
larger than real RAM and you are out of luck. Ways you might be able
to try and fix this:

sed -e 's/LANG=.*$/LANG="C"/' /etc/sysconfig/i18n

and do this for any shells you might have. This will lower the memory
footprint of anything that is trying to do a i18n text items.

--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator