Swapping Too Agressive? Too much ram used for buffers?

Brian Ristuccia (brianr@osiris.ml.org)
Sat, 14 Nov 1998 13:52:24 -0500

While copying a large number of files (aprox 5gb) from one 18gb ultrawide
disk to another identical disk, my system becomes unusably slow every time
kswapd becomes active. I see it shoot up to the top of top in state "SWN". I
have two 128mb swap partitions both set to the same priority, one on each
drive. The controller is an aic7880 on my pr440fx motherboard. I have two
200mhz pentium pro chips and 128mb of ram installed on that board.

1:50pm up 18:11, 12 users, load average: 7.51, 9.70, 8.74

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 127944 94532 33412 15144 28596 47612
-/+ buffers/cache: 18324 109620
Swap: 261496 45316 216180

Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/sdb1 partition 130748 22472 0
/dev/sda1 partition 130748 22760 0

I have another dimm stick on the way, but from the looks of the -/+
buffers/cache line, I'm not sure if lack of physical ram is really my
problem.

Any suggestions?

-- 
Brian Ristuccia
brianr@osiris.ml.org
bristucc@baynetworks.com
bristucc@cs.uml.edu


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