2.6.9-ck1: swap mayhem under UT2004

[Alastair Stevens]

Con and others: I've been running 2.6.9-ck1 for a couple of days, and seem 
to have hit on a major swapping issue....

My machine is a UP Athlon 2500+ with 512MB, and everything hums along 
nicely under normal desktop usage.  But when launching UT2004, it just 
crawls and jerks like hell.  At one point, it appeared to have frozen 
completely, but I managed to switch to a text console to see what was 
happening, and basically I'd hit a swap frenzy: kswapd was sucking 50% of 
the CPU, fighting with the UT2004 process.

My RAM appeared to be almost "full", with no cache/buffers, but only a few 
hundred K of swap was actually being used, and this wasn't changing.   
The kswapd frenzy carried on for at least a couple of minutes; then 
suddenly everything went smooth again and the game played perfectly from 
then on.

This is definitely new behaviour; I've run every recent 2.6 kernel, with 
and without the staircase scheduler patch (but not the full -ck), and 
never had any problems before.  Yes, I'm running the dratted Nvidia 
driver, but that's not the issue as it's been loaded with every other 
kernel.  Switching back to 2.6.9-rc3 makes everything behave perfectly 
again....

Any ideas?  Any more info required?
Cheers
Alastair

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Alastair Stevens : child of 1976       /-'_              LPI (Level 1)
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