Bug 97494
| Summary: | (VM)Excessive swapping in spite of 200MB free RAM | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [Retired] Red Hat Linux | Reporter: | Daniel Brockhaus <redhat> |
| Component: | kernel | Assignee: | Arjan van de Ven <arjanv> |
| Status: | CLOSED WONTFIX | QA Contact: | Brian Brock <bbrock> |
| Severity: | medium | Docs Contact: | |
| Priority: | medium | ||
| Version: | 9 | CC: | mattdm, riel |
| Target Milestone: | --- | ||
| Target Release: | --- | ||
| Hardware: | i386 | ||
| OS: | Linux | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Fixed In Version: | Doc Type: | Bug Fix | |
| Doc Text: | Story Points: | --- | |
| Clone Of: | Environment: | ||
| Last Closed: | 2004-09-30 15:41:09 UTC | Type: | --- |
| Regression: | --- | Mount Type: | --- |
| Documentation: | --- | CRM: | |
| Verified Versions: | Category: | --- | |
| oVirt Team: | --- | RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host: | |
| Cloudforms Team: | --- | Target Upstream Version: | |
| Embargoed: | |||
Thanks for the bug report. However, Red Hat no longer maintains this version of the product. Please upgrade to the latest version and open a new bug if the problem persists. The Fedora Legacy project (http://fedoralegacy.org/) maintains some older releases, and if you believe this bug is interesting to them, please report the problem in the bug tracker at: http://bugzilla.fedora.us/ |
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows 98; .NET CLR 1.0.3705) Description of problem: The problem occurs on a machine with 512MB RAM and 1024MB swap. top reports about 200MB free RAM (not actually free, but used for cache and buffers). Used swap space varies between 15MB and 25MB. iostat (and sar) report that the swap partition is busy (about 15 transaction per second). In my opinion the system shouldn't swap at all while there is enough RAM available. Even if one considers that swapping out unused program parts to use the freed RAM for harddisk cache might be more efficient there's absolutely no justification for this heavy swap activity. I've disabled swap (via swapoff) to avoid burning out yet another harddisk (one rests in peace already due to a similar problem). This resulted in about 20MB less free RAM, but the system appears to run fine. I'd prefer a less drastic solution, though. Are there any options in /proc/sys I could use to make swapping out less aggressive? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel-2.4.20-18.9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Boot. 2. Wait a few minutes. 3. Watch HD activity light flicker. Actual Results: Heavy swapping. Expected Results: No swapping. Additional info: The software running on this system is making heavy use of anonymous mmap().