pre-2.1.89-5 acting strangely when doing file-intensive operation

Jani Hakala (jahakala@cc.jyu.fi)
Sun, 1 Mar 1998 19:08:30 +0200

There's something strange in pre-5. I was running a perl-script, which
goes through a lot of files, in news-spool. Free showed this (only a
couple of seconds between each free):

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63528 52996 10532 3388 18156 24480
-/+ buffers/cache: 10360 53168
Swap: 104384 47356 57028

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63528 57296 6232 5016 18860 25660
-/+ buffers/cache: 12776 50752
Swap: 104384 45084 59300

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63528 61788 1740 5232 20588 28104
-/+ buffers/cache: 13096 50432
Swap: 104384 44852 59532

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 63528 19568 43960 3448 4680 3376
-/+ buffers/cache: 11512 52016
Swap: 104384 45136 59248

So free memory approaches zero rapidly, and after that 20-40 MB is
freed. And used swap stays in 45 MB even if there's no need for
swapping. ps showed that over half of running processes were in
'SW'-state.

Jani Hakala

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