Description of problem: Every few days, OK maybe every week or so, my system gets into a state where excessive paging occurs. It goes on for at least 5 minutes. Today, it went on for 20 minutes before I reset the system. It's terrible! Response is horrendous. User space clocks skip forward 30 seconds at a time. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): kernel 2.4.20-9 How reproducible: 100%, if you wait long enough. Steps to Reproduce: 1. Normal usage. Use X. I have Evolution, Opera, a couple terminals, OpenOffice, and Acrobat all open. 2. Wait for a while. Actual results: After some time and usage, system begins excessive paging activity. Except for the disk, which is crazy with activity, system slows to a crawl. Bringing up an alternate text terminal and logging in takes 10 minutes, and I never did receive a prompt before I lost my patience. Hitting the power off button results in the message: apm cannot enter requested state, busy (or something like that). So I know the system is not dead. It's just busy paging. Expected results: I expect the paging algorithm to make only a few page faults at a time. In the last instance, my system had plenty of RAM allocated for the file cache, and it could have easily dumped these pages and swapped into this space. Although it's hard to know what it was doing, it seemed like it was rearranging all the pages in by some excruciatingly ineffecient means. Additional info: Pentium-3, 933 Mhz 512 Mb RAM 512 Mb swap divided evenly across my two IDE drives, equal priority
My mistake -- it was paging for at least 30 minutes before I reset it. I discovered that just now because my clock was behind by 30 minutes! Apparently, all the paging activity significantly delayed the system clock, and because I was using NTP, the OS wrote the delayed values to the hardware clock. Something is seriously wrong if excessive paging can mess with the system clock.
Please can you attach a dmesg after boot and info on how much ram you have
Created attachment 92662 [details] dmesg log after boot My dmesg log after rebooting after the described failure. I have 512 Mb RAM.
It happened again today, and here is some more information. I had several memory soaking apps running. About 90% of my swap space was used and 80% of my RAM was in use. My system had been running for only 2.5 hours since the last reboot. The major VM users: Opera: 314 MB Open Office: 262 MB Nautilus: 106 MB Evolution: 194 MB GIMP: 70 MB (total of these: 946 MB) Except for Evolution, all of the other windows were open in the same workspace. I was using GIMP. Switching between applications caused some heavy paging and mild slugishness. At some point, I saved and then quit GIMP, and then the swapping hell began. 15 minutes later, the last of the GIMP windows finally disappeared and my system was usable again. While swapping furiously, the mouse cursor moved with no hesitation. I am running gkrellm to show system status, and it froze for the entire 15 minutes.
a patch for this problem was recently added to the Red Hat Linux 9 kernel, I expect it will be released with one of the next security erratas
Actually, now I think this is a Gimp bug. See Bug 99485.
CLOSE -> NOTABUG ?