[BUGS] clearing out swap space ..

[jonathan michaels]

   andrew hello

On Tue, Oct 07, 2008 at 11:13:55PM +1100, Andrew Reilly wrote:
> Hi Jonathan,
> 
> On Tue, 7 Oct 2008 22:42:36 +1100
> jonathan michaels <jlm at caamora.com.au> wrote:
> >    i'm wondering if what i am seeing on a freebsd v6.2-release (iso-cdrom images
> >    cut to cd) installed been runing for a about 6 months and has been doing this
> >    ever since installation.
> 
> I thought that 6.2 was fairly stable, but that was a long time
> ago, for me.  Plan to upgrade to 7.1 soon after it's released is

   as soon as it hits teh shelves .. er iso reposits, though it might be a tight
   fit on this box . 256 mb onboard vid not much vidram (ando 15 bit x11 colour
   and 20 gb ide drive 10/100 mbit ethernet .. not much else.

 my first advice.  The 7-stable series is looking to be a corker,
> IMO.
> 
> >    it seems to to slowly consume swap space and just locks up when it exhausts teh
> >    available swap space .. teh screen display verticle bars right across teh
> >    screen all the 16 colours over and over again.
> 
> How do you know that it's consuming swap space?  Is it running

   it exhausts swap space and locks up solid .. this time i noticed the box
   starting to slow down and i started up systat -vmstat in a window/pane and
   watched as 1 teh machine got slower and teh swapspace used numbers got higher,
   its up to about 30 percent usedup now with a 512 mb swap 

> out and killing random processes?  (Killing the next faulting
> process is the expected behaviour of a system like modern FreeBSD
> that will overcommit virtual memory.)  The other symptom that you
> will probably notice is lots of extra swap behaviour: you'll hear
> the disk and things will be slow.

   it is a quiet disk bit i does get a bit rettly towards teh end and teh machine
   dose slow down to become just about unsuable .. enter and wait minutes .. hour
   plus to get screen responce .. slow,

> Frankly, I can't see your display anomaly being caused by
> exhaustion of swap.  That sounds like something is going badly
> wrong in your graphics card driver, or perhaps in the hardware of

   could be right .. this was a recycled busness box (lease runout)works
   reasonablty well in text mode just not with x11 running more than a about 8
   apps kalarm couple browsers (differnt jobs not nessacery internet browsing)
   open offic is a nightmare and will stop the box dead in this stat or close to
   end if tey to startup k/xpdf will really knock it for a loop as it consumes
   vir-dram opening documents .. could site others .. if req ?? latter

> your graphics card itself.  It's not overheating, is it?

   don't seem so the system has basic fan that does get noiser on teh few hot days
   but in winter it stay on the same 'slow' mode all season long thereabouts ..

> >    i never had thes problems with freebsd v2.x (when i ran x11) or v5.x just with
> >    v6 .. i'm trying to understand what is going on here ?? i've looked at man and
> >    couldn't find any thing that looks like it would be appropriate.
> 
> Man pages can generally only describe how things *ought* to
> behave, when they're working properly, because when something is
> broken, there's often an unlimited and unimaginable number of
> ways that it can misbehave...
> 
> What you describe with your graphics card sounds either like a
> hardware fault (most likely, imo), or something in kernel space

   i'm not saying its not but its a bit hard to test, its embedded ???

> going so far off the rails that it's writing repetitive jibberish
> to vast blocks of physically addressed memory (that's how it

   is there any way of checking for this ??

> could violate the memory management restrictions that should
> otherwise stop anything other than the graphics card driver from
> writing to the graphics card.)

   is there any simple sort of looking that i could do ?? (kernel space looking
   with gdb (stuff like that) is a bit beyound me sorry
 
> >    pointers suggestions/explanation .. appreciated
> 
> I doubt that this explanation will have helped, I'm afraid, but

> it's all that I can think of, at the moment...

   thanks, its a reap pain in teh neck, but its been like this from day one, it
   was an xp profession box in an earlier life so it sorta worked prlly reason i
   got it was cause it not work so good any more .. not whine juast statement of
   facts .. life i guess
 
> Good luck.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Andrew.

   thanks andrew .. sorry fro messy post bit of a 'long ' day med stuff and just
   plain tired .. thanks


   much kind regards

   jonathan

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