Re: Query about failure of Debian 6 64 bit to swap properly

[Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com>]

On 8/30/2012 12:28 AM, Bret Busby wrote:
[snip]
> Last night, it was taking up to 20 minutes for the system to respond to
> a mouse click, and, typing in the text in composing an email message
...
> and, about 40-60% of the
> characters that are typed in, simply disappear, requiring composing an
...
> So, this 64 bit Debian 6 appears to be of the nature, in its
> status,similar to the nature of the version named experimental.
...

You've got some problems alright, a myriad of symptoms you've described.
 But these symptoms have nothing to do with the way the kernel is
swapping to disk, unless you've improperly changed the values of
parameters in /proc/sys/vm.  You mentioned changing one of them to 70.
If you've changed others, change them all back to default values and see
if that helps.

Three other possibilities come to mind.  One, you have a hardware
problem with the disk controller or the drive.  Check dmesg for errors.
 Two, a worm has infiltrated your system, and is wreaking having.

And/or 3, you're running some applications/processes that execute at
boot, causing all of these problems.  Are you running any
distributed.net programs that make heavy use of CPU/memory/disk?  If
their process priority was changed (reniced) that could explain a lot of
these symptoms.  Though I doubt this is the case.

Any way you slice it, you've provided no log snippets throughout this
thread, and with this kind of system behavior, you'd surely see
something in dmesg or syslog pointing to the problem.

Do you know how to access your log files?  Have you ever used a bash
prompt or is your Linux experience limited to the GUI?  If the latter, I
can see why you're having such problems.  If that's the case you are
currently incapable of helping us help you.

-- 
Stan