Ran into something tonight I've not seen before. The system has been up for 20 days, and has not missed a beat of any sorts, even when getting beat on at a decent level. What my concern is, tonight I attempted to log out so X would restart, and from the looks of all the stuff on the screen (which never did reload gdm) was chock full of statements where swap had been exhausted, and processes were being killed off. The only way I was able to recover was to login via another machine and kill -9 the gdm process. Could not access any of the VT's at all. What I'm wondering is if swap is not being released, rather if processes are not being moved out of swap when the load decreased. From the looks of top
top - 21:20:59 up 19 days, 23:07, 5 users, load average: 0.22, 0.24, 0.17 Tasks: 146 total, 1 running, 145 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu0 : 1.7% us, 0.3% sy, 0.0% ni, 98.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu1 : 0.7% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.3% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu2 : 0.0% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 100.0% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Cpu3 : 0.7% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 99.3% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si Mem: 2055916k total, 1199952k used, 855964k free, 50464k buffers Swap: 1052216k total, 64020k used, 988196k free, 781740k cached
There seems to be plenty of swap free, even tho the cache is still OK. I didn't have the presence of mind to run any other tools to see the system behavior. Believe this is the first time I've had to kill gdm to reload and recover. Perhaps there is some tuning or tweaking I could do? The main processes are the wx model, which uses anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4G of memory, plus all the normal stuff you find on a workstation.
Suggestions anyone?
Thanks..