Prevent process in disk wait

[Chris]

On Oct 12, 2006, at 5:18 AM, FreeBSD-Questions wrote:

> Hello list,
>
> While installing the Ruby port on a 6.1-Release system (uname -a
> ...
> 37788  p0  DL+   39:43.11 ./ruby18 ./bin/rdoc --all --ri --op
> /usr/local/share/ri/1.8/system .
>
> The system is an old Pentium 5 with a standard IDE drive. Is there a

When I installed portupgrade last weekend, it seemed to have ruby as  
a dependency and hung for many hours at the exact same point. The  
display of the make was stopped on ri. In looking at top, I noted  
that swap file was being used heavily. This particular system was a  
Pentium 500Mhz with only 128M. I attributed the problem to data IO  
and swap IO contention. After about 4, maybe 5 hours at that one  
spot, it did complete. If your situation is the same, it apparently  
needs more memory. I performed the same steps on all my other systems  
which range from 512MB to 8GB. None had any problems at that step  
except the memory deficient system. Two of the other systems also  
have old IDE drives so wasn't just disk IO but a combination of swap  
and disk IO. My solution to avoid this in the future will be to  
upgrade to at least 512M on that system and increase swap to 1G  
spread it over two drives rather than just system disk as it is now.