linux-kernel - Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused

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Message-ID: <1353871800.22969.28.camel@soupermouf>
Date:	Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:30:00 +0200
From:	Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@....net>
To:	linux-kernel@...r.kernel.org
Subject: Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy
 even though swap is unused

On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
> on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a
> backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local
> ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card).
> Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the
> system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile
> is rarely touched.

I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which
needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell
is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing 
small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The
ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please
advise!


Thanks,
Dimitris



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