On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:38:45AM +0100, Nicolas Joly wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 02:09:41PM +0100, Frank van der Linden wrote:
> > On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 10:36:06PM +0000, Andreas Kahari wrote:
> > > Another thing:  If I mount my drives with softdep, the system
> > > sometimes "freezes" for short periods of time (about 3-5
> > > seconds or so).  This seems to occur under heavy disk activity
> > > (rebuilding userland) when the pagedeamon process which will
> > > use a lot of CPU periodically.  Is this a known issue, or a
> > > non-issue?  I thought it was annoying enough to make me disable
> > > softdep.
> > 
> > Yes, that's a known issue. There are some discussions going on
> > how to fix this, basically it's a flaw in the trickle syncer.
> 
> Same here, under low free memory conditions (many NFS reads).
> 
> I don't know if that helps; but we noticed, under such circumstances,
> that removing all swap partition/files let the system behave a lot
> better ... without hangs.

In my case, swap is never used and I have loads (around 100Mb)
of memory "free" (from 'top' display).  And, as I wrote earlier
in a followup to my first post, this does not seem to be
directly linked to setting the softdep option on the SATA drive.

Cheers,

Andreas


ps. Just built XFree86-4.4.0 natively on amd64, and it works!

-- 
Andreas Kähäri                      |(==)|
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East Anglia                         |(==)|
England                             |=)(=|