kswapd and system response

[Peter Jay Salzman <p@dirac.org>]

hi there,

every so often, my system (2.4.13 smp) gets really sloooooow.   a typical top
looks something like:

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
    5 root      14   0     0    0     0 RW   99.9  0.0   7:52 kswapd
    7 root       9   0     0    0     0 SW    1.9  0.0   0:04 kupdated
 2053 root      13   0   984  984   776 R     0.7  0.4   0:01 top
 2063 p          9   0  2080 2080  1292 S     0.3  0.9   0:00 vim

kswapd is definitely not behaving correctly.

the thing that brought it on this time was gtv (an mpeg viewer which uses
sdl) bailed on me.   X "kind of" froze, so i killed it.  but that's only the
cause this time around.  last time, it happened between the time of going to
bed and waking up (ie- the system was pretty much idling from a user's pov).

this has been happening with the 2.4.13 kernel every couple of days.

i thought i'd post it to lkml to let someone know that there's a problem.
i'm not subscribed to the list, so if there's anything else i can do to help
diagnose what's going on next time it happens, please cc me.

i feel like such a loser when i reboot.   ;)   i heard that 2.4.15 was just
released, so i'll try upgrading to that and see if it helps any.


pete

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