Re: Linux 2.6.31 - very swap-happy with plenty of free RAM

From: Rik van Riel
Date: Wed Nov 18 2009 - 10:23:28 EST


On 11/18/2009 02:56 AM, Dan Merillat wrote:
1.7gb of disk cache, 750 meg of free RAM, and it swaps out 300meg in a
matter of seconds when given access to a swapfile, then thrashes the
disk like crazy because that RAM was actively in use.

Ideas on where to start looking? If this is a vmware issue I'll take
it to them.
This smells like a higher order memory allocation
failed and either is doing a lot of direct reclaim or
kicked kswapd until it freed up lots of memory.

However, I do not believe we keep track of higher
order reclaims in /proc/vmstat or elsewhere I
looked :(
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