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Paran0id
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Joined: 11 Jun 2002
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 11, 2002 9:41 pm    Post subject: Evil swap locks up my box... =( Reply with quote

Hello everyone...

I dont really know where else to turn with this problem I have. Thing is I switched to Gentoo from FreeBSD a while ago. At first everything worked fine and I was happy with finally beeing able to use the nvidia drivers but recently my box has been experiencing some serious problems.

The problem is that the system seems to eat swap space for no reason and when it reaches 100% it pretty much locks up. At first I couldn't figure out what the problem was but since I'm running Enlightenment I added a little MemWatch epplet and it's deffinently a swap/memory problem. First I thought that it might have been me adding too little swap space for the applications I'm running but I ran the exactly same applications (except the nvidia driver that is) under FreeBSD, with the same swap space without any problems.

One thing I dont understand is shouldn't closing running program free up some swap space? Even though I close all the applications I have running in X it doesn't free up any at all. The result of this is a swap that's allways getting filled up and when it reaches 100% the system is pretty locked up (can't move the mouse or press any keys on the keyboard). Everything left to do is a reboot and start all over again. =(

The only thing I can do to at least keep my box alive for a day or so is to "swapoff -a; swapon -a" once a while. This of cause pretty much kills every program I'm working with but at least the swap is cleaned and I can escape another reboot. This however is only a sollution when I'm actually sitting at my box. Woke up around 10min ago from a few hours of sleep and noticed it was time to reboot (again...). Do I really have to quit X11 and everything with a GUI to keep my box alive when I can't babysit it!?

All this may of cause be some kind of missconfiguration on my side so please, please help me out here. I really dont wanna switch OS again but if I cant resolve this I guess I have to. =/

The applications running when I whent to sleep this time was X-Chat, Opera 6.0 and 3 xterm sessions. My box is an old Fujitsu with an Intel Celeron 333MHz CPU, 64MB SDRAM, 128MB swap partition, and so on...

If you want to have a look at some configuration files or such I'll gladly post them here if it helps to resolve the issue. Just dont know which files might be important atm.

One thing quite ironic is that I have a friends box running Win95 (god forbidd!) next to this one and it hasn't been rebooted in a week. ;)


Anyway, any help at all is more than welcome!

Thanks in advance!

// n0id...
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mb
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Joined: 25 Apr 2002
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 7:58 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

unfortunally.. these lookups are "normal" if you running out of memory and swap if full... i had bad experiences with my agenda handheld
you can increase your swap partition or add a second one....

#mb
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lx
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 8:36 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

My swap is almost never used (256Mb memory), but if you think the nvidia driver is causing it, try running with the normal driver. You got to find out what's causing it. Try running in plain console for a while, opening some applications (well some memory intensive ones (kernel rebuild). See if memory is freed after closing them. (cat /proc/meminfo / top )
You could temporarly create a swapfile, just to check if you keep running out of memory, or if memory usage becomes stable over some time. Well difficult problem if you can't pin it down to a cause.

Cya lX.
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mb
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 9:48 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

- OR -

it is AGP related ?? imho the memory used by X is the sum of real program memory + memory used by your grapic card ??

plz correct me, if i'm wrong !


#mb
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lx
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 10:00 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

X uses a lot of cached memory, well it says it uses 280Mb while the total memoy used of my whole system including buffers is 250Mb (256Mb system memory) 0k swap is used. So I won't look at the memory used by X, it ain't all used.

Cya lX.
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sulu
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 10:44 am    Post subject: memory leak ? Reply with quote

Could it be a memory leak in one of the applications u use.

I had the same effect with one of my progrmms. It allocated a temporary buffer in a function call within a loop but i forgot to free that buffer. *blushing*. The program quickly consumed the whole memory and the system was efficitvely locked. After patching the leak everything was fine.
So i recommend monitoring the applications with e.g. top and check if one of them continuously eats your memory.

Greetz
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Paran0id
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PostPosted: Wed Jun 12, 2002 11:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Turns out it's been xchat eating my swap space all the time. No idea why but at least now I know what's to blaim.

Thanks for all the help and sugestions though!


// n0id...
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Utoxin
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PostPosted: Thu Jun 13, 2002 12:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Paran0id wrote:
Turns out it's been xchat eating my swap space all the time. No idea why but at least now I know what's to blaim.

How big do you have your xchat scollback buffers? Because they eat up a let of memory, if you let them get big.
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Paran0id
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 14, 2002 5:09 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Utoxin wrote:
How big do you have your xchat scollback buffers? Because they eat up a let of memory, if you let them get big.


I was thinking about that... I have them at 300 lines max and I'm constantly in 5 channels... Question is could that really eat 128MB swap space all by itself!?


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Xaanin
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 14, 2002 6:04 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Are you running the latest version of Xchat? Maybe there's a mem leak in your version?
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Paran0id
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PostPosted: Fri Jun 14, 2002 12:26 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Well, I'm using xchat 1.8.8 atm while the latest "stable" version is 1.8.9... I checked the change log though and it said nothing about .9 fixing any mem leaks... =/

I've also changed from a 300 line buffer to just 100 lines and I have a feeling it's helping a bit but the swap is still climbing...


// n0id...
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