From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1423543Ab2LFOUr (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Dec 2012 09:20:47 -0500 Received: from cantor2.suse.de ([195.135.220.15]:60425 "EHLO mx2.suse.de" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932710Ab2LFOUq (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Dec 2012 09:20:46 -0500 Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 15:20:44 +0100 From: Jan Kara To: Dimitrios Apostolou Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused Message-ID: <20121206142044.GB18547@quack.suse.cz> References: <1353851735.22969.18.camel@soupermouf> <1353871800.22969.28.camel@soupermouf> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <1353871800.22969.28.camel@soupermouf> User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sun 25-11-12 21:30:00, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: > On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: > > on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a > > backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local > > ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card). > > Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the > > system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile > > is rarely touched. > > I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which > needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell > is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing > small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The > ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please > advise! Hmm, it seems commit 4eff96dd5283a102e0c1cac95247090be74a38ed might be interesting for you. It landed in -stable kernels recently as well if I remember right... Honza -- Jan Kara SUSE Labs, CR