Re: pre-patch-2.0.31-2 + werners buffer patch

Miquel van Smoorenburg (miquels@cistron.nl)
17 Jul 1997 16:29:42 +0200

In article <199707171058.MAA07899@boole.fs100.suse.de>,
Dr. Werner Fink <werner@suse.de> wrote:
>> Last night it crashed again, and rebooted through the watchdog. I installed
>> a script that ran every minute and did a "ps".
>> # ps auxww
>> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TT STAT START TIME COMMAND
>> news 21924 5.4 82.5 145M8 52276 ? D 02:10 2:44 expireover -z
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>Ohhh ... these values are really at the limit of this system
>Hmmm .... please remove the two lines
>
> /* Give the physical reallocated page a bigger start */
> mem_map[MAP_NR(page)].age = (2*PAGE_INITIAL_AGE);
>
>in shm_swap_in() of ipc/shm.c and in swap_in() of mm/page_alloc.c ...
>the swapped in pages of the big expireover job should not get the bigger
>start of twice of PAGE_INITIAL_AGE because try_of_free_page() in mm/vmscan.c
>runs in trouble to get a aged page from this big job for the same big job.
>
>... maybe the system needs more physical ram in the future for a 2.2.x ...

I have found the problem. The machine has rebooted twice, and has been
down in total for an hour or so. Since we're moving offices, and the
helpdesk/support telephonelines have already been moved this was the perfect
time to play BOFH without being bothered by users :)

There was a .overview file of 154 MB in the news spool. With holes in it,
but expireover didn't know that ofcourse. That's why expireover
grew so big, and the system crashed. I'd rather seen that expireover just
got killed, but that didn't happen.

I had a bash root shell with "kill -9 <pid>" already setup, but it
didn't even react to the enter key anymore. That was over the network btw,
not on the console.

Anyway, the results:

- The 15 Jul buffer patch behaves better than the 11 Jul AFAICS
- Removing the above mentioned lines did not make any difference for me

Thanks - Mike.

-- 
| Miquel van Smoorenburg |  "I need more space" "Well, why not move to Texas" |
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