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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!news.Hawaii.Edu!ames!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!doug.cae.wisc.edu!tillemaj
From: tillemaj@cae.wisc.edu (John Edward Tillema)
Subject: Disk Thrashing question
Organization: U of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering
Date: 27 Sep 93 17:04:42 CDT
Message-ID: <1993Sep27.170443.444@doug.cae.wisc.edu>
Lines: 32
I have had FreeBSD running for about a month or so on my 486
now, and have noticed one major disadvantage to it compared to Linux
(at least for me). It seems to take virtually nothing to cause me
to start swapping like crazy, and even hang the system. My setup is:
8 Meg Ram, 17 Meg swap space, 486/33, 340 Meg drive, with 300 for Unix.
If i run anything in the background, or compile one program, or sun
a comm program, you can hear the disk swapping like crazy and performance
really drops(you can easily type a line of text before the first character
is printed). I can even hang the system. I found a good way of doing
this is the following:
run olvwm.
run XV and view a gif (or jpg, or probably anything), not necessarily
large, the last one was only 200k.
run emacs and load in a large file, here I'm talking about a 7 meg file.
(Oh, and I also have the openwindows clock program running)
The result I get is that it brings the emacs window up, and then all disk
activity stops, the mouse doesn't respond, and there is no way to abort
aside from a reboot of the system. In Linux, things would get slow, but
never like that, and it never hung like that either, the only crashes I had
was when running X+openwin in 8 megs w/o swap. I have narrowed down the
FreeBSD kernel so that it only has devices I use (eg. got rid of the SCSI
stuff). Is this to be expected? I wouldn't think so.
Any ideas?
John
tillemaj@cae.wisc.edu