Re: Query about failure of Debian 6 64 bit to swap properly
On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 02:16:23 +0800, Bret Busby wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2012, Camaleón wrote:
(...)
>> 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.
Then you have to find the culprit. Did you looked at the logs?
> 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.
That's the normal behaviour when you run/hit OOM.
> 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.
Fine, but what's the process that is taking all of your RAM resources?
>> 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.
That's what I said >:-?
> 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.
When the file manager crashes, do you have anything (message, warning...)
printed in the screen?
> The file manager does not work well.
To debug a problem with your file manager run the test I told you (use
the command line to create/delete big files). If command line commands
are working well, try with different file manager (you can be hitting
some kind of specific bug for that specific application).
>>> 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.
What "exactly" do you think it has been stopped from working proplery?
> 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.
I don't think you have a problem with swapping but experiencing some kind
of OOM problem which leaves your system exhaust. Remember that your swap
will be used if you have configured the system (kernel) for doing so.
Anyway, unless you really need it for something specific (and if so, I
would like to know "what"), 40 GiB of "/swap" is a bit insane and a waste
of space :-)
Greetings,
--
Camaleón
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