Re: efficacy of Linux w/o swap

phil-news-nospam_at_ipal.net
Date: 05/17/05 

Date: 17 May 2005 00:45:04 GMT

On Mon, 16 May 2005 21:10:11 +0200 Kasper Dupont <kasperd@daimi.au.dk> wrote:
| phil-news-nospam@ipal.net wrote:
|>
|> When I was in tty1 and pressed Alt-F2
|> to go to tty2, it would pause and not switch for quite some time, then
|> evetually complete the switch. Worst case event took 2.5 minutes.
|
| I don't recall ever seeing switches between
| text terminals delayed unless I had disabled
| the keyboard interrupt.
|
| Did you notice any indication on whether the
| kernel had actually processed the keypress?

The VC would eventually switch. So it got the keystroke at some point,
and processed it at some point. I have no idea if this is due to
interrupts being disabled at the time of press or not. But another
thing happening suggested some other issues. Sometimes I would see the
screen either wipe the new data on in a jerky fashion, or just do it in
slow motion. I have even seen this happen doing nothing more than
running a kernel compile. There is 256 MB on this desktop machine, and
I typically see 200 to 400 MB in swap space and RAM full. Here is what
top show right now having rebooted yesterday due to power loss.
Eventually the size used in swap will get up to 400 MB in about a week.
I can put another 256 MB of RAM in. But when I do, it spends MORE time
in it's stuck state when it gets there. Right now it's running fine.
This is kernel 2.4.23 on this one. I will be moving to 2.6.11.X soon.

=============================================================================
Tasks: 200 total, 4 running, 196 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3% user, 2.6% system, 97.1% nice, 0.0% idle
Mem: 256144k total, 251728k used, 4416k free, 41888k buffers
Swap: 1028120k total, 189668k used, 838452k free, 27396k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 2044 seti 20 13 14812 14m 1116 R 98.0 5.7 1415:13 setiathome
20276 root 13 0 1036 1036 768 R 2.0 0.4 0:00.16 top
    1 root 8 0 88 76 44 S 0.0 0.0 0:04.10 init
    2 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:41.29 keventd
    3 root 19 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 ksoftirqd_CPU0
    4 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:09.72 kswapd
    5 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bdflush
    6 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:19.09 kupdated
    7 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kreiserfsd
   71 root 3 -12 456 416 400 S 0.0 0.2 0:10.93 gpm
  124 root 9 0 568 528 492 S 0.0 0.2 0:06.11 syslogd
  127 root 9 0 1084 424 424 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.16 klogd
  130 daemon 9 0 568 520 520 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 atd
  133 root 8 0 572 568 516 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.00 crond
  137 root 9 0 4228 3668 3084 S 0.0 1.4 0:01.94 bind-dns
  152 nsd 9 0 1220 488 488 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.11 nsd
  156 root 9 0 1936 1412 1288 S 0.0 0.6 0:00.48 bind-sdns
  157 nsd 9 0 1220 488 488 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.01 nsd
  163 root 8 0 376 232 232 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.03 sshd_10
  169 root 9 0 372 232 232 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 sshd_12
  175 root 8 0 500 432 396 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.03 sshd_22
  181 root 9 0 372 232 232 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 sshd_23
  187 root 9 0 372 232 232 S 0.0 0.1 0:00.00 sshd_24
  190 root 9 0 504 444 444 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.01 inetd
  193 root 9 0 796 688 628 S 0.0 0.3 0:00.03 ntpd
  194 _ntp 9 0 704 628 564 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.22 ntpd
============================================================================= 

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

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