Hello,

I recently noticed that some of my programs (mplayer for instance)
would crash with an allocation error (BadAlloc), as if I had run out
of memory, and when I checked free, I noticed that my swap partion
wasn't being used at all.

[jobo - 16:51:40 ~]$ free
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 246936 242196 4740 0 8964
127344
-/+ buffers/cache: 105888 141048
Swap: 687952 0 687952

Since I'm using swaret to keep my system updated with
slackware-current, I figured current was the issue, and when I checked
another machine I had running current, it had the same problems with
swap.

Have anyone else experienced this problem with current?

regards

Brian Graversen

Brian Graversen wrote:
> I recently noticed that some of my programs (mplayer for instance)
> would crash with an allocation error (BadAlloc), as if I had run out
> of memory, and when I checked free, I noticed that my swap partion
> wasn't being used at all.

what does 'cat /proc/swaps' say? perhaps all you need is a swapon. if so,
you should check why swap isn't activated upon boot.

--
Joost Kremers joostkremers@yahoo.com
Selbst in die Unterwelt dringt durch Spalten Licht
EN:SiS(9)

Brian Graversen wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I recently noticed that some of my programs (mplayer for instance)
> would crash with an allocation error (BadAlloc), as if I had run out
> of memory, and when I checked free, I noticed that my swap partion
> wasn't being used at all.
>
> [jobo - 16:51:40 ~]$ free
> total used free shared buffers
> cached
> Mem: 246936 242196 4740 0 8964
> 127344
> -/+ buffers/cache: 105888 141048
> Swap: 687952 0 687952
>
> Since I'm using swaret to keep my system updated with
> slackware-current, I figured current was the issue, and when I checked
> another machine I had running current, it had the same problems with
> swap.
>
> Have anyone else experienced this problem with current?
>
> regards
>
> Brian Graversen

Hi,

What kernel do you use?
I think 2.6.x :-) if so,do:

mkswap -v1 /dev/hxx
swapon -a

rintek

rintek <rintek@wuuk.sulawesi> wrote in message

> What kernel do you use?
> I think 2.6.x :-) if so,do:

Yes, 2.6.3 and 2.6.6 on the two different machines

> mkswap -v1 /dev/hxx
> swapon -a

I tried that (after first running swapoff -a), and then I let the
machine work on some different programs for a while, but it still
doesn't use swap

/var/log/messages states that the swap is added without problems (the
only strange this is that the priority keeps dropping by one, each
time I re-add the swap).

May 13 10:38:50 Jupiter kernel: Adding 473876k swap on /dev/hda5.
Priority:-4 extents:1

regards

Brian Graversen

jobo@daimi.au.dk (Brian Graversen) wrote:
>rintek <rintek@wuuk.sulawesi> wrote in message
>
>> What kernel do you use?
>> I think 2.6.x :-) if so,do:
>
>Yes, 2.6.3 and 2.6.6 on the two different machines
>
>> mkswap -v1 /dev/hxx
>> swapon -a
>
>I tried that (after first running swapoff -a), and then I let the
>machine work on some different programs for a while, but it still
>doesn't use swap

The -v1 option goes /way/ back, and is unlikely to be significant.

Incidentally, I've just upgraded two machines from 2.6.0 to
2.6.6, and the first of them has been up for a day and a half
now, and has yet to use 1 byte of swap. Mighty suspicious...

If, by tomorrow, nothing gets paged out just because it was
sleeping too long I'll probably back off to 2.6.5 to see if that
changes.

>/var/log/messages states that the swap is added without problems (the
>only strange this is that the priority keeps dropping by one, each
>time I re-add the swap).
>
>May 13 10:38:50 Jupiter kernel: Adding 473876k swap on /dev/hda5.
>Priority:-4 extents:1

Hmmm... I just tried that, and it didn't change in my case. However,
I do specify the priority in /etc/fstab:

/dev/sdb1 swap swap defaults,pri=1 0 0
/dev/sdc1 swap swap defaults,pri=1 0 0
/dev/sdd1 swap swap defaults,pri=1 0 0
/dev/sde1 swap swap defaults,pri=1 0 0


--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com

Floyd L. Davidson <floyd@barrow.com> wrote:
>Incidentally, I've just upgraded two machines from 2.6.0 to
>2.6.6, and the first of them has been up for a day and a half
>now, and has yet to use 1 byte of swap. Mighty suspicious...
>
>If, by tomorrow, nothing gets paged out just because it was
>sleeping too long I'll probably back off to 2.6.5 to see if that
>changes.

If you want your system swap more, try
echo 100 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

The value can be between 0 and 100, the default is 60.

On Wed, 12 May 2004 15:05:13 +0000, Joost Kremers wrote:

> Brian Graversen wrote:
>> I recently noticed that some of my programs (mplayer for instance)
>> would crash with an allocation error (BadAlloc), as if I had run out
>> of memory, and when I checked free, I noticed that my swap partion
>> wasn't being used at all.
>
> what does 'cat /proc/swaps' say? perhaps all you need is a swapon. if so,
> you should check why swap isn't activated upon boot.

I am experiencing the same symptoms, swap never gets used, I don't know if
that is necessarily a bad thing but I would like to know if swap is at
least enabled. When I do 'cat /proc/swaps' I get this:

Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hda1 partition 506008 0 -1

I also check /proc/sys/vm/swappiness and it is set to 60. Does the
priority of -1 mean that swap is enabled but will only be used when
absolutely necessary?

Hello all,

> I recently noticed that some of my programs (mplayer for instance)
> would crash with an allocation error (BadAlloc), as if I had run out
> of memory, and when I checked free, I noticed that my swap partion
> wasn't being used at all.

I'll just post a followup to my own message, perhaps it will help anyone
with the same problem.

I rsync'ed current, and burned a CD, and made a clean install of slackware
current on one of my machines, and after only 32 minutes uptime, I have
already used 208 kb of my swap partition

I'm not sure whether it was some faulty upgrade with swaret, or my something
else, but at least slackware-current itself is not to fault.

I did notice something strange during the installation, and was wondering
if anyone else have recently installed a clean copy of slackware-current.

No /etc/fstab file was written to my harddrive during the installation, and
lilo.conf had /dev/fd2 as root instead of /dev/hda1. I hade to manually
edit those two files to make my system boot after the installation

regards

Brian Graversen

On Thu, 13 May 2004 01:40:11 -0700, Brian Graversen wrote:
> /var/log/messages states that the swap is added without problems (the
> only strange this is that the priority keeps dropping by one, each
> time I re-add the swap).
>
> May 13 10:38:50 Jupiter kernel: Adding 473876k swap on /dev/hda5.
> Priority:-4 extents:1

This is not strange, it is normal. It's a feature of some sort. I
suppose the theory is that a user would want to specify swap devices in
the order in which s/he would want them to be used.

In practice, however, one should always specify priorities in fstab(5)
(or at the swapon(8) command line.) Generally you'll want partitions on
different physical disks to have the same priority. This might improve
swap performance somewhat, by spreading out the burden of the disk I/O
to different devices, even to different busses. (Whether or not that
translates into a noticeable improvement is doubtful. Heavy swap usage
is bad in any case. The best possible swap management does not compare
to the slowest imaginable RAM usage.
--
/dev/rob0 - preferred_email=i$((28*28+28))@softhome.net
or put "not-spam" or "/dev/rob0" in Subject header to reply

I take back what I said in my ealier post, I'm not using the swap at
all. And this is with the standard 2.4.26 kernel that comes with
slackware-current, so it's not an 2.6 issue. I guess current does have
a problem, or perhaps I have some hardware issues

Brian