bsa@telotech.uucp (Brandon S. Allbery) (10/23/89)
In <3864@altos86.Altos.COM>, jerry@altos86.UUCP claims: +--------------- | In article <506@oglvee.UUCP> jr@oglvee.UUCP (Jim Rosenberg) writes: | >it fail on a request to get only 1 page unless I'm out of swap space? (Which | >I'm not. We're getting these with many many thousand blocks of free swap | >space -- we have a swap(1) which will show these.) | | >Is there a tunable parameter that will rescue me here? | | Not really. You really are running out of swap space. Even though | "swap -l" may show plenty of swap space remaining, it is misleading. | | UNIX allocates swap space for the entire .data and .bss regions whenever | a process is exec'ed. Even though swap -l shows plenty of swap space | available, most of the swap space is allocated to processes, which, although | they may not currently be swapped out, still tie up the swap space. +--------------- Something in your explanation does not match reality. (a) On a system with 8MB RAM, 25776 blocks swap, 436 blocks reported "in use" by /etc/swap -l, I have observed "fork failed" and getcpages messages. This seems unlikely by your explanation. (b) On a system with 8MB RAM and a "standard" swap space (12880 blocks), the system shouldn't page at all unless you run programs with more text than data/bss. But they *do* page. Kindly explain these. ++Brandon -- -=> Brandon S. Allbery @ telotech, inc. (I do not speak for telotech.) <=- Any comp.sources.misc postings sent to this address will be DISCARDED -- use allbery@uunet.UU.NET instead. My boss doesn't pay me to moderate newsgroups. ** allbery@NCoast.ORG ** uunet!hal.cwru.edu!ncoast!{allbery,telotech!bsa} **