On Monday 15 October 2007 8:37:44 am Nick Piggin wrote: > > Virtual memory isn't perfect. I've _always_ been able to come up with > > examples where it just doesn't work for me. This doesn't mean VM > > overcommit should be abolished, because it's useful more often than not. > > I hate to go completely offtopic here, but disks are so incredibly > slow when compared to RAM that there is really nothing the kernel > can do about this. I know. > Presumably the job will finish, given infinite > time. I gave it about half an hour, then it locked solid and stopped writing to the disk at all. (I gave it another 5 minutes at that point, then held down the power button.) Lost about 50 open konqueror tabs... > How much swap do you have configured? 2 gigs, same as ram. > You really shouldn't configure > so much unless you do want the kernel to actually use it all, right? Two words: "Software suspend". I've actually been thinking of increasing it on the next install... > Because if we're not really conservative about OOM killing, then the > user who actually really did want to use all the swap they configured > gets angry when we kill their jobs without using it all. I tend to lower "swappiness" and when that happens all sorts of stuff goes weird. Software suspend used to say says it can't free enough memory if I put swappiness at 0 (dunno if it still does). This time the OOM killer never triggered before hard deadlock. (I think I had it around 20 or 40 or some such.) > Would an oom-kill-someone-now sysrq be of help, I wonder? *shrug* It might. I was a letting it run hoping it would complete itself when it locked solid. (The keyboard LEDs weren't flashing, so I don't _think_ it paniced. I was in X so I wouldn't have seen a message...) (To be honest, I can never remember how to trigger sysrq on a laptop keyboard. Presumably X won't intercept it the way it does alt-f1 and ctrl-alt-del...) Rob -- "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code." - Ken Thompson. - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-scsi" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
