> From: Rik van Riel <riel@conectiva.com.br>
>
> On Mon, 5 Jun 2000, Billy Harvey wrote:
>
> > A "make -j" slowly over the course of 5 minutes drives the load
> > to about 30. At first the degradation is controlled, with
> > sendmail refusing service, but at about 160 process visible in
> > top, top quits updating (set a 8 second updates), showing about
> > 2 MB swap used. At this point it sounds like the system is
> > thrashing.
>
> That probably means you're a lot more in swap now and top
> has stopped displaying before you really hit the swap...
>
> > Is this failure process acceptable? I'd think the system should
> > react differently to the thrashing, killing off the load
> > demanding user process(es), rather than degrading to a point of
> > freeze.
>
> Please take into account that the system is quite a bit beyond
> where you could take previous kernels ... oh, and the attached
> patch should fix the problem somewhat ;)
FWIW, a I've had a 'make -j bzImage' loop drive the long-term load
up to >100, with a perfectly responsive top. The box just needs to
be beefy enough - with 768MB RAM, around ~250MB were free (can't
exactly remeber if it used 500MB and 250MB were free or it was the
other way around).
It did not, however, compile the kernel correctly. The compiles
bombed out with wierd (spurious) errors (I didn't attempt to track
down the cause).
Regards,
Kai
-- Kai Harrekilde-Petersen Exbit Technology A/S- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jun 15 2000 - 21:00:17 EST