Hi Berck, No I don't mean cache, sorry I was a bit drunk&very tired when I wrote that:) What I meant was swap.. the problem I think you have is that if your memory is full, you have to swap pages of memory to disk, to get more free memory. But for swapping pages to disk you need to write to disk. I think you have your swap mounted on your ataraid partition right? Now if the (current) ataraid driver has to write to disk, it needs to allocate memory for buffers. But the memory was full, thats why the thing started swapping pages to the disk in the first place. So memory allocation fails, & no more memory can be freed by swapping to disk because more memory needs to be allocated to swap to disk. What we have here is a deadlock, the ataraid driver is waiting for the virtualmemory system to get some free memory and the virtualmemory system is waiting for the ataraid driver to write some to be swapped out pages to disk. I hope I am a bit more clear now:). However this was a problem half a year ago (when I had the same problem you describe) so I'm not completely sure if it is fixed or not. Arjen de Ven probably knows, he's the maintainer of the ataraid driver (if I remember correctly) he's a busy man so be patient, but he reads this mailing list so I hope he can confirm/deny the story I just told you.(Arjen?). BTW, as to the solutions I proposed, buying more memory just avoids swapping, and thus the deadlock (when I bought the 1.5GB it was very cheap, prices are high again these days). Putting swap on a disk with another driver (just a disk to another ide/scsi controller) might help too. Disabling swap will probably work to, but it works only if you have a lot of memory, and the kernel guys say NEVER disable swap, so nothings guaranteed. Hope I helped you a bit more this time:) regards Bas Hulsken On Mon, 2002-08-19 at 18:02, ataraid-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx wrote: > Message: 2 > From: "Berck E. Nash" <berck@xxxxxxxxxxxx> > To: <ataraid-list@xxxxxxxxxx> > Subject: Re: Ataraid-list digest, Vol 1 #285 - 12 msgs > Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2002 17:29:08 -0400 > Reply-To: ataraid-list@xxxxxxxxxx > > Thanks! I don't really understand the description, entirely, but I'm so glad > to see a solution to my problem listed. It seems that disabling disk > caching would slow things down quite a lot? Is there way to do this easily > so that I can verify that this is, indeed the problem? > > 1.5GB of ram, seems a somewhat pricey solution to the problem... Shall I > email this van de Ven character and see what he has to say?
