Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932127Ab3CLCP4 (ORCPT ); Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:15:56 -0400 Received: from mail-ob0-f180.google.com ([209.85.214.180]:58591 "EHLO mail-ob0-f180.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1754601Ab3CLCPn (ORCPT ); Mon, 11 Mar 2013 22:15:43 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 Date: Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:15:43 +0800 Message-ID: Subject: Re: doing lots of disk writes causes oom killer to kill processes From: Hillf Danton To: Michal Suchanek , LKML , Linux-MM Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1823 Lines: 49 >On 11 March 2013 13:15, Michal Suchanek wrote: >>On 8 February 2013 17:31, Michal Suchanek wrote: >> Hello, >> >> I am dealing with VM disk images and performing something like wiping >> free space to prepare image for compressing and storing on server or >> copying it to external USB disk causes >> >> 1) system lockup in order of a few tens of seconds when all CPU cores >> are 100% used by system and the machine is basicaly unusable >> >> 2) oom killer killing processes >> >> This all on system with 8G ram so there should be plenty space to work with. >> >> This happens with kernels 3.6.4 or 3.7.1 >> >> With earlier kernel versions (some 3.0 or 3.2 kernels) this was not a >> problem even with less ram. >> >> I have vm.swappiness = 0 set for a long time already. >> >> >I did some testing with 3.7.1 and with swappiness as much as 75 the >kernel still causes all cores to loop somewhere in system when writing >lots of data to disk. > >With swappiness as much as 90 processes still get killed on large disk writes. > >Given that the max is 100 the interval in which mm works at all is >going to be very narrow, less than 10% of the paramater range. This is >a severe regression as is the cpu time consumed by the kernel. > >The io scheduler is the default cfq. > >If you have any idea what to try other than downgrading to an earlier >unaffected kernel I would like to hear. > Can you try commit 3cf23841b4b7(mm/vmscan.c: avoid possible deadlock caused by too_many_isolated())? Or try 3.8 and/or 3.9, additionally? Hillf -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/