linux-kernel - Re: git pull on linux-next makes my system crawl to its knees and beg for mercy

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Message-ID: <1158166a0912230911o5c33adfcg9a39da22aec7b44a@mail.gmail.com>
Date:	Wed, 23 Dec 2009 18:11:36 +0100
From:	Denys Vlasenko <vda.linux@...glemail.com>
To:	"Luis R. Rodriguez" <mcgrof@...il.com>
Cc:	Stephen Rothwell <sfr@...b.auug.org.au>,
	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org, Bob Copeland <me@...copeland.com>
Subject: Re: git pull on linux-next makes my system crawl to its knees and beg 
	for mercy

On Wed, Dec 23, 2009 at 5:20 PM, Luis R. Rodriguez <mcgrof@...il.com> wrote:
>> Is it allocating/using so much memory
>> that your box goes into a severe swap storm?
>
> Could be, 979M virtual, 298M resident size (non swapped), 58665 shared.
>
> Unfortunately when this happens I cannot log into my box and run good
> diagnostics, that's how much of a pain in the bolas this is.

Nicing it may make it easier to do diagnostic work.

> Some
> morning I had enough patience I did leave vmstat and iostat running
> and didn't see much out of the ordinary except CPU wait time was
> pretty high. I did manage to get at least htop running once and took a
> screenshot (and this took me about 10 minutes to generate):
>
> http://bombadil.infradead.org/~mcgrof/images/2009/12/git-merge.jpg

Looks like swap space is 2/3 used. This is an indication
of memory starvation.

It may be a residual condition - you have a lot of potentially
bloated programs running. What do you see if you reproduce
this situation soon after boot, with minimum of other running programs?
For one, definitely do not start web browser(s) and such.
Ideally, do not run X at all.

If you still see a lot of swap used, then this is it - git
requires more memory for this task. The possibility that
kernel has a bug where it needlessly swaps out is remote.

--
vda
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