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slow system out of memory swapping

Subject: Re: What is causing my server to page?
References: <2b30e5d8.0205020620.dbe94fb@posting.google.com>
<3cd1cb97$0$79562$8eec23a@newsreader.tycho.net>
<2b30e5d8.0205090139.741b15e6@posting.google.com> 
From: spcecdt@deeptht.armory.com (John DuBois)
Date: 09 May 2002 17:32:49 GMT

In article <2b30e5d8.0205090139.741b15e6@posting.google.com>,
John Seed <deletethisbit_john_h_seed@hotmail.com> wrote:
>As you have probably gathered, I'm no expert at this, but I think the
>ps was telling me that process 24450 was using about 1.5gig of memory.
>245450 is a Visionfs process;
># ps -ef | grep 24450
>    root 24450  3763  1 09:01:27       ?    00:00:44 vfsd --profile
>/usr/vision/
>vfsprofile
...
>This explains why everything works happily again.  The 24450 process
>turned into a <defunct> process.  I have a good dozen of these on the
>server, which I presume are all the aftermath of the same problem.
>
>
>My VisionFS level is 9.00.925 which I know is old, but this is quite
>an old legacy system which is pretty much frozen until it is replaced
>and I fear change when it comes to VisionFS.  Also, I don't get this
>on any other VisionFS installation.
>
>Any other ideas as to what I can do to investigate/resolve this issue?

No ideas regarding visionfs specifically, but you can reduce the impact of this
problem by limiting the amount of memory available to vfsd via ulimit.

Find where vfsd is started up, and if it's a script, replace its invokation
with something like this:

ksh -c 'ulimit -v 20000; vfsd [vfsd arguments ...]'

That will limit it to using 20MB.  If it tries to use more than that, it will
die in the same manner that it does now at 1.5+GB.  You can probably pick a
better number by looking at ps output to see what its normal size is.
Something will need to start a new vfsd when it dies else you won't have
visionfs service, but from your description it sounds like that's already
happening automatically.  To determine where it's being started, look at its
parent process (pid 3763 in the output above).  If it's not a script, you can
probably put a memory limit on whatever ancestor of it is started at multiuser
time, most likely from one of the files under /etc/rc2.d

        John
-- 
John DuBois  spcecdt@armory.com  KC6QKZ/AE  http://www.armory.com/~spcecdt/
 

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