[OpenIndiana-discuss] Swap/stack space continuously shrinking

[Reginald Beardsley]

I've been forced to power cycle my Hipster system a couple of times lately because it starts thrashing so badly I can't even move the mouse pointer.

This is in a situation where I have a paused VM.  If LRU paging was in effect, the paused VM would eventually get swapped to disk and the other processes would recover.  That is not happening.  It's behaving as if the resident working set was being made too large in an attempt to reduce latency when users switch windows.

I've been meaning to ask about this as I had to power cycle the system yesterday because of the memory leaks in Firefox.  I paused the Debian VM and started the Win 7 VM at which point everything ground to a halt.  On a previous occasion I let the machine run and the mouse pointer would eventually move, then freeze, move a little more, freeze, etc.  It was often 5-10 minutes before the pointer moved again.

Historically going back to SunOS 4.1 I have always configured swap as 8x DRAM so that idle processes could be paged to disk.  I'll do some experiments on my Solaris 10 u8 system and see how it behaves if I start several programs that consume all of core and then try to edit a file in an xterm.

Prior to encountering Unix I had tuned a MicroVAX with a couple of batch queues to run at 100% CPU utilization for weeks at a time.  If an interactive user logged in, the system responded as if it were completely idle.  That's relatively easy to configure in a transient process OS, but the bookkeeping makes it impractical in a fork-exec OS.

Reg