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From: bx970@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Donna A. Lilly)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: bsd process sticks in 'D' state
Date: 11 Nov 1994 07:11:59 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Lines: 37
Message-ID: <39v5fv$47e@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>
Reply-To: bx970@po.cwru.edu (Donna Lilly)
NNTP-Posting-Host: kanga.ins.cwru.edu
Hi!
I have a unix process that runs on a Sun 4/30 with 54 Mb of swap space (virtual memory) and 16 Mb real memory as shown below:
slx1:/var/adm grep swap mess*
messages:Nov 7 19:58:27 slx2 vmunix: swap on sd0b fstype spec size 54000K
slx1:/var/adm grep mem mess*
messages:Nov 7 19:58:27 slx2 vmunix: mem = 16028K (0xfa7000)
messages:Nov 7 19:58:27 slx2 vmunix: avail mem = 13131776
The problem is the machine does not appear to be executing my program
efficiently. The symptom is the process state is almost always 'D'
rather than 'R' or 'S' like it is on my other programs that I believe
are executing much more efficiently:
slx2:~ rsh slx1 'ps -aux '
stty: TCGETS: Operation not supported on socket
Where are you?
USER PID %CPU %MEM SZ RSS TT STAT START TIME COMMAND
bx970 9575 16.8 59.449088 7620 p0 D Nov 33395:00 cdmbv
bx970 11783 11.8 3.6 240 464 ? R 00:36 0:00 ps -aux
bx970 11780 8.5 4.5 116 580 ? S 00:36 0:00 tcsh -c ps -aux
If anyone has any suggestions as to how to get this program running
faster I'd certainly be grateful!
P.S. The program is a learning algorithm on a large text corpus and it
does need 49Mb of space to represent the data. I decided to read in all
my data on startup since unix allows a process to consume essentially
all the virtual memory that's available when it starts up, and the use
of virtual memory in unix seems to generally be quite efficient
(e.g. loading a large array - like 49 Mb - with a binary disk file of
data).
--
Donna Lilly
Cleveland, OH