> I've seen the same scenario about 2-3 times a week. kswapd and one or
> more processes all CPU bound, totalling to 100%. I've had 'esdplay' hung
> on several occasions, and 2-3 times it's been xscreensaver (3.29) hung.
> The 'hung' processes are consistently immune to kill -9, even as root, which
> indicates to me that they're hung inside a kernel call or something.
Do you have > 800Mb of RAM ?
> In page_alloc.c, __alloc_pages() has a 'goto try_again;' which will
> cause it to loop around and try to get more memory. I'm wondering if
Even outside of that certain drivers also loop on alloc failures as does
TCP.
> would explain the high context-switch rate. I'm not clear on how kswapd
> can end up getting stuck and failing to free up something - unless it ends
> up calling __alloc_pages itself indirectly and the PF_MEMALLOC bit isn't
> enough to get it the memory it needs, causing a deadlock/loop between
> kswapd and __alloc_pages/wakeup_kswapd().
bounce buffers for one
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Apr 15 2001 - 21:00:18 EST