Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S933277Ab1D1P5x (ORCPT ); Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:57:53 -0400 Received: from bedivere.hansenpartnership.com ([66.63.167.143]:32825 "EHLO bedivere.hansenpartnership.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1759658Ab1D1P5v (ORCPT ); Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:57:51 -0400 Subject: Re: [BUG] fatal hang untarring 90GB file, possibly writeback related. From: James Bottomley To: Colin Ian King Cc: Chris Mason , linux-fsdevel , linux-mm , linux-kernel , linux-ext4 In-Reply-To: <1303928753.2417.6.camel@lenovo> References: <1303920553.2583.7.camel@mulgrave.site> <1303921583-sup-4021@think> <1303923000.2583.8.camel@mulgrave.site> <1303923177-sup-2603@think> <1303924902.2583.13.camel@mulgrave.site> <1303925374-sup-7968@think> <1303926637.2583.17.camel@mulgrave.site> <1303928753.2417.6.camel@lenovo> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Date: Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:57:42 -0500 Message-ID: <1304006262.2598.2.camel@mulgrave.site> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Evolution 2.32.1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 683 Lines: 19 On Wed, 2011-04-27 at 19:25 +0100, Colin Ian King wrote: > Just like to add that I've seen almost identical issues with 2.6.38 > copying large amounts of data to an ext4 filesystem with systems with > small amounts of memory. > > I found that increasing /sys/fs/ext4/sdaX/max_writeback_mb_bump worked > around the issue. With the PREEMPT kernel, values of 256 and 512 don't prevent kswapd spinning up to 99% and staying there. James -- 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/