Re: High CPU load with kswapd and heavy disk I/O

[Ken Savage]

On Tue August 12 2003 16:49, Nuno Silva wrote:

> My guess is that this is the cause. LOWMEM pressure because of very
> large directories... Relating to this, linux-2.6.0-test3-mm1 has Ingo's
> 4G/4G memory split. Can you try this kernel, enable 4G/4G feature, and
> report back?

Something about the 2.6 (and the rmap patched 2.4) kernels causes
lockouts on the server -- for reasons OTHER than kswapd.  The server
running the delete-old-files process runs hundreds of other CPU and disk
I/O intensive processes/threads, and it doesn't look like 2.6 is yet able
to handle the load.  Unfortunately, the server is a production environment
machine at a remote site, so lockouts/reboots/kernel panics are baaaad :(

I've seen other mentions of kswapd/kupdated problems in 2.4.xx, but
few mentions of solutions.  Have people just learned to avoid the
situations that trigger the mad thrashes?

Ken
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