Daniel Erat said on Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 08:08:49AM -0800:
I was the poster who initiated the previous thread on this subject. The
problem disappeared here after we went down to 2 GB of memory (although
we physically removed it from the server rather than passing the arg to
the kernel... shouldn't make a difference though, I'd imagine). We went
straight from 4 GB to 2 GB, so I can't comment on the results of using 3
GB.
Our problem didn't seem to directly correspond with the 1 GB threshold
-- it wouldn't manifest itself until the server had allocated all 4 GB
of RAM. After a reboot, it would be nice and speedy again for a day or
two until all the memory was being used for buffering again.
This was the behavior I saw as well. I did a bunch of research and source
reading before actually figuring out what was going on; it wasn't a well
documented bug for some reason... I guess there aren't that many people running
large boxes using 2.4.
This makes me think that the problems I saw with 2GB were not related to the IO
subsystem, but were something else. Time to go play around a bit; getting
those boxes up to 2GB without having to do a kernel patch/upgrade cycle would
be nice.
M