Re: Query about failure of Debian 6 64 bit to swap properly
On Wed, 29 Aug 2012, Camaleón wrote:
On Wed, 29 Aug 2012 16:23:47 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
(...)
So, my query is this; is the inability of 64 bit Debian 6, to swap
properly, instead using increasing amounts of RAM until it runs out of
RAM, then crashing, while having 40GB of unused swap partition allocated
and "swappiness" set to 70, due to the inability of the file manager to
cope with filesize greater than 1GB?
I think you are talking about two problems here. Let's see...
First, it seems that you have some sort of problems with your swap but,
what are those problems exactly?
Some hints:
- With 8 GiB of RAM you can (almost) safely turn off your swap at all, it
shouldn't be used. You can indeed run this test (→ turn off swap) to see
how your system behaves.
- The kernel will use all of the system resources which are available and
that includes /swap.
The problem is that the computer runs out of RAM.
The RAM usage increases, until it runs out of RAM, then, as at present,
the system becomes morbidly slow, and takes a few seconds to respond to
key presses or mouse moves, then, after a while, it just crashes.
After about 95% of the RAM is used, so that the computer becomes
frustratingly slow, it starts to use the swap space, up to about the
same amount as the RAM, which is about 1/6 of the swap space.
Example: at present, the SystemMNonitor shows
Memory usage - 7.6GB (98.4%) of 7.7GB
Swap usage - 7.9GB (19.3%) of 40.9GB
and my XT with 640KB RAM and a 10MB HDD, used to run faster than this is
running.
Second, you say you can't delete big files (>1 GiB of size) because your
system becomes unmanageable and runs out of memory. This is of course not
normal (even a system with as little as 256 MiB of RAM shouldn't
experience this problem at all).
No.
I said that I can save and delete files up to about 1.2GB.
I can not save files larger than about 1.2GB, to the system.
The file manager crashes, and, crashes the system, when the saved file
size gets to 1.2GB, if it gets that big. I have had some attempted file
saves crash at 12MB, crashing the system.
The file manager does not work well.
I do hope that Debian 7 implements memory paging, or swapping.
I'm not completely sure what you mean by this :-?
It seems to have stopped working properly, in about Debian 5, and I hope
that Debian 7 gets it working again.
In Debian 5, I could sometimes kickstart memory swapping, by running
something like the GIMP, and opening images, then closing the
application, at which stage, memory swapping would sometimes start (on a
different computer - Debian 5 would not run on this computer), but I
have not yet managed to get memory swapping working properly in the 64
bit Debian 6. I do not remember whether the memory swapping works on the
32 bit installation of Debian 6, on my NX5000 laptop.
--
Bret Busby
Armadale
West Australia
..............
"So once you do know what the question actually is,
you'll know what the answer means."
- Deep Thought,
Chapter 28 of Book 1 of
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
A Trilogy In Four Parts",
written by Douglas Adams,
published by Pan Books, 1992
....................................................
Reply to: