[comp.unix.microport] Running out of swap space in V/AT

dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith) (06/14/88)

My newsfeed began sending me compressed news a few weeks ago and since then
I have been running into a problem fairly regularly.  The uncompress eats
up a large amount of memory, and if I happend to have something else that
is a memory hog (like vnews with a vi sub-process) I run out of swap space
and the system starts complaining.  However, instead of doing something
sensible, like killing a process or two, it seems to get hung up in a
perpetual swap state.  Only my super-user shell works, everything else
is hung up.  Trying to kill -9 some of the offensive processes leaves
me with zombies that won't go away, and a system that still won't do anything.
The only way to get the system to work again is to reboot.

Has anyone else run into this problem?  Any fixes for this besides making
a larger swap partition?


-- 
David L. Smith
{sdcsvax!jack,ihnp4!jack, hp-sdd!crash, pyramid, uport}!sdeggo!dave
sdeggo!dave@amos.ling.edu 
Sinners can repent but stupid is forever.

john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) (06/18/88)

In article <214@sdeggo.UUCP>, dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith) writes:
> My newsfeed began sending me compressed news a few weeks ago and since then
> I have been running into a problem fairly regularly.  The uncompress eats


     I ran into this a while back on an abnormally large News session.
Unfortunely I beleive I beleive the only solution is to increase the
size of your swap partition. I increased mine to 8000 blocks and 
havnt had a problem now in 9 months or so.

					John



-- 
John Gayman, WA3WBU              |           UUCP: uunet!wa3wbu!john
1869 Valley Rd.                  |           ARPA: wa3wbu!john@uunet.UU.NET 
Marysville, PA 17053             |           Packet: WA3WBU @ AK3P 

wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes) (06/25/88)

In article <214@sdeggo.UUCP>, dave@sdeggo.UUCP (David L. Smith) writes:
% My newsfeed began sending me compressed news a few weeks ago and since then
% I have been running into a problem fairly regularly.  The uncompress eats

In article <601@wa3wbu.UUCP>, john@wa3wbu.UUCP (John Gayman) writes:
>      I ran into this a while back on an abnormally large News session.
> Unfortunely I beleive I beleive the only solution is to increase the
> size of your swap partition. I increased mine to 8000 blocks and 
> havnt had a problem now in 9 months or so.

I initially did this, too, but then I decided it was taking far too
long decompressing the news files with the 16-bit decompress.  My feed
didn't want to have to arrange a special 13-bit compression for my
site (they feed about 5 other sites, too).  So I just bought a 2400
baud modem and xfer every thing uncompressed.  It is actually faster
than the total time to xfer compressed and de-compress the files.  My
system is fairly slow, though - 8 Mhz 286/287.  I do handle quite a
bit of traffic, the average is a little over 1 meg/day - I feed a
college in Ogden (wsccs, net23, wscvax, and wsceng).
-- 
     /|\ 	Barnacle Wes @ Great Salt Lake Yacht Club, north branch
    / | \		     @ J/22 #49, _d_J_i_n_n_i
   /__|__\
   ___|____		"If I could just be sick, I'd be fine."
  (       /		-- Joe Housely,  owner of _E_p_i_d_e_m_i_c --
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