> I noticed this happening as well when I had a heavy user load going and
> suddenly someone would start pulling a two meg mp3 file through the
> httpd. My fix, of course, was to nice the watchdog -19 on startup. I
> don't think it's happened again since I did that.
That is a good idea...
> I note that this is also what kswapd does, though it only goes to -12
> (no that was not a Spinal Tap reference). I scanned the watchdog docs
> and nowhere does it suggest nice'ing the watchdog process. Any reason
> why I shouldn't be?
AFAIK, there's no reason you should not do that. As a matter of facts,
the next version of Softdog (1.2) will include a few features to ensure
that it is not slowed in its task by other processes, including
mlock()ing its memory, changing its priority and scheduling policy, as
well as making it a bit more configurable. I'm also working on a patch to
make the kernel part a bit easier to configure without recompiling.
I'm running Softdog with the new features with no problems here, so it
should be out soon....
Christophe