Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1756176Ab0BEMfP (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Feb 2010 07:35:15 -0500 Received: from borg.medozas.de ([188.40.89.202]:45685 "EHLO borg.medozas.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1755973Ab0BEMfN (ORCPT ); Fri, 5 Feb 2010 07:35:13 -0500 Date: Fri, 5 Feb 2010 13:35:11 +0100 (CET) From: Jan Engelhardt To: Jens Axboe cc: Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: Re: kswapd continuously active In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: <20100125130627.GO13771@kernel.dk> User-Agent: Alpine 2.01 (LSU 1266 2009-07-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1784 Lines: 49 On Monday 2010-01-25 14:22, Jan Engelhardt wrote: >On Monday 2010-01-25 14:06, Jens Axboe wrote: >>> >>> with 2.6.32.2 on sparc64 I am seeing that there is a sync(1) process >>> busy in D state, with the following trace: >>> >>> sync D 000000000079299c 7552 4851 1 0x208061101000004 >>> Call Trace: >>> [000000000053ca58] bdi_sched_wait+0xc/0x1c[...] >>> [000000000053ca78] sync_inodes_sb+0x10/0xfc >>> >>> kswapd is also active all the time, writing something to disk[...] >> >>That doesn't sound good. What does /proc/meminfo say? What file systems >>are you using? >January 25 Feb-05 >MemTotal: 8166752 kB 8166752 >MemFree: 3243552 kB 3781776 >Buffers: 207968 kB 4912 >Cached: 2728216 kB 2684400 >SwapCached: 0 kB 0 >Active: 2203136 kB 495624 >Inactive: 2152544 kB 3263136 >Active(anon): 1167256 kB 488168 >Inactive(anon): 252952 kB 583912 >Active(file): 1035880 kB 7456 >Inactive(file): 1899592 kB 2679224 >Unevictable: 0 kB 0 >Mlocked: 0 kB 0 >SwapTotal: 0 kB 0 >SwapFree: 0 kB 0 >Dirty: 141624 kB 2662184 >Writeback: 0 kB .. Today this happened again. So I looked at /proc/meminfo to paste today's values next to those from January. That is when I noticed the "Dirty" value - and thus I ran watch -d -n 1 'grep Dirty /proc/meminfo' What I see is that the dirty amount - a sync is currently running - only decreases with at most 400 KB/sec, often less than that. -- 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/