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Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 11:58:19 +0200
From: Attila Kinali <attila@...ali.ch>
To: linux-mm@...ck.org
Cc: linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Long lasting MM bug when swap is smaller than RAM
Moin,
There has been a bug back in the 2.4.17 days that is somehow
triggered by swap being smaller than RAM, which i thought had
been fixed long ago, reappeared on one of the machines i manage.
<history>
Back in 2002, i had a few machines, running 2.4.x kernels, which
i upgraded heavily from some 16-64MB RAM to a couple 100MB
(changing mainboards at times, but keeping the harddisks).
Due to the upgrade of RAM, the swap size became a lot smaller
than RAM size, sometimes not even half as much.
Under most conditions these machines worked fine, but sometimes,
they showed a strange behavior: At times, the swap use would grow
(depending on the machine and its use faster or slower, sometimes
at 1MB/minute) until it was full. I couldnt figure out what filled
swap back then, couldnt find any programm that used a lot of memory.
And even more, the RAM portion that was used as cache and buffers
was most times still very large, ie it didnt seem like something using
a lot of memory.
After swap was full, nothing happend. No programms crashing, no errors
in the logs, nothing.... Until later (between hours and a few weeks),
the OOM would suddenly start to kick in and kill applications. This
time, something would use a lot of memory, but i couldn't figure out
what. None of the applications running would use more than usual.
And even killing the usual culprits (Mozilla, X11,...) wouldnt help.
The only cure was to reboot.
All the machines back then were running Debian, a vanilla kernel,
and had more RAM than swap and were x86 boxes. Other than that,
they didnt had much in common. One was a machine with an Adaptec
2940UW, others had IDE, one had a K6-III CPU, others were Intel.
Some had a lot of disk, others very little. Machine usage was
fileserver, firewall/router, desktop, laptop.
I reported this bug back then but never got an answer, so i used
the only fix i had available back then: disable swap completely.
</history>
Now, 7 years later, i have a machine that shows the same behavior.
Some data:
We have a HP DL380 G4 currently running a 2.6.29.4 vanilla kernel,
compiled for x86 32 bit.
It was originaly purchased in 2005 with 2GB RAM and a few weeks
ago upgraded to 6GB (no other changes beside this and a kernel upgrade).
The machine, being the MPlayer main server, runs a lighttpd, svnserve,
mailman, postfix, bind. Ie nothing unusual and the applications didn't
change in the last months (since the update from debian/etch to lenny).
---
root@...suki:/home/attila# uname -a
Linux natsuki 2.6.29.4 #1 SMP Sun May 31 22:13:21 CEST 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
root@...suki:/home/attila# uptime
11:41:07 up 29 days, 13:17, 5 users, load average: 0.15, 0.36, 0.54
root@...suki:/home/attila# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 6023 5919 103 0 415 3873
-/+ buffers/cache: 1630 4393
Swap: 3812 879 2932
---
I want to point your attention at the fact that the machine has now
more RAM installed than it previously had RAM+Swap (ie before the upgrade).
Ie there is no reason it would need to swap out, at least not so much.
What is even more interesting is the amount of swap used over time.
Sampled every day at 10:00 CEST:
---
Date: Wed, 17 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5893 130 0 405 3834
Swap: 3812 190 3622
Date: Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5793 229 0 340 3939
Swap: 3812 225 3586
Date: Fri, 19 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5820 203 0 341 3899
Swap: 3812 275 3536
Date: Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5264 758 0 459 3181
Swap: 3812 325 3486
Date: Sat, 20 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5761 262 0 348 3865
Swap: 3812 297 3514
Date: Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5875 147 0 397 3681
Swap: 3812 353 3458
Date: Tue, 23 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5748 275 0 193 3949
Swap: 3812 415 3396
Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5779 244 0 176 3924
Swap: 3812 519 3292
Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5812 210 0 345 3856
Swap: 3812 611 3200
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5830 192 0 431 3688
Swap: 3812 682 3129
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5697 326 0 442 3621
Swap: 3812 719 3093
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:00:02 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5890 132 0 402 3886
Swap: 3812 784 3028
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:00:01 +0200 (CEST)
Mem: 6023 5388 635 0 425 3321
Swap: 3812 826 2985
---
As you can see, although memory usage didnt change much over time,
swap usage increased from 190MB to 826MB in about two weeks.
As i'm pretty much clueless when it commes to how the linux VM works,
i would appreciate it if someone could give me some pointers on how
to figure out what causes this bug so that it could be fixed finally.
Thanks a lot in advance
Attila Kinali
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