Description of problem: Virtual memory seems to have stopped working all of a sudden. When I try to open a memory intensive application such as Gnumeric, Open Office, Printer Configuration or Printing there is a pause of several minutes, Open Office never finishes loading. Also there is a long pause logging in to Gnome but not KDE. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): Kernel 2.6.8-1.521 How reproducible: Log in to Gnome or open a memory intensive app. Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Actual results: Long pauses (5 minutes) or hangs. Expected results: 20 second pause Additional info: Problem began right after the box froze at boot time with an error message "lost interrupt" (if I remember right). System monitor shows !00% RAM in use at these times (250 Mb.) but never any swapping (no disk activity either)
Since filing this report I seem to have stumbled on a workaround. After filing the report I saw that swap was in fact still working but that there was continuous network activity. On investigating my network card settings I discovered that the "Bind to MAC address" box in "Hardware Device" was ticked, clearing it has solved the problem! Still a bug perhaps but not so severe now. What is "Bind to MAC" anyway?, I dont remember ticking it but it doesn't seem to affect my home network.
bind to mac is useful if you have 2 NICs in your machine, and you want to ensure one of them gets eth0 and the other gets eth1. I highly doubt its related to your problem. There's been no major complaints about swap malfunctioning in FC2, so I'm a bit curious what exactly you see happening. Can you run 'vmstat 1' and then try to reproduce this bug ? leave it run for a little while (ie, longer than you think is an acceptable time to be waiting for the app to load), and then cut-n-paste the vmstat output into this bug. That will allow us to see what was going on at the time. (The output of free, and cat /proc/meminfo whilst its under load will also be useful) Thanks.
The problem seens to have gone, I can't reproduce it now. If it recurs then I will carry out the investigations suggested by Dave Jones. I can only suggest that if any one else encounters a similar glitch , then try playing with your NIC settings as that seemed to do the trick for me.