vmstat 'b' (disk busy?) field keeps climbing ...

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Matthew D. Fuller wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 23, 2006 at 11:38:44PM -0400 I heard the voice of
> Chuck Swiger, and lo! it spake thus:
>>
>> Yeah-- it's more common for a system to need more RAM for dynamicly
>> allocated content which would be placed into the swapfile then it
>> uses binary executable pages, it's possible to go the other way,
>> too.
>
> Yeah, and it's WAY the other way.
>
>        0 swap pager pageins
>        0 swap pager pageouts
>    31750 vnode pager pageins
>    15954 vnode pager pageouts
>
> That speaks of HUGE memory pressure in program text; plenty for the
> 'data' of the programs, but really really tight for the programs
> themselves.  That'll also lead to a lot of disk thrashing.  And there
> aren't even all that many fork() calls, relative to my box (of course,
> mine does things like ports builds that spawn of totally stupid
> numbers of processes, so that may be a quirk here rather than there).
>
> Perhaps rebuilding a bunch of stuff with -Os will gain you some
> breathing room, but more memory or less load is probably the only real
> answer.  And I think you already had 4 gig in an i386 box, so you're
> kinda in trouble on the memory side.

Would having only 1 CPU (1 died, used to be two) cause this, or pure 
memory?

And, if things are *that* tight, shouldn't it be doing more swapping?

pluto# pstat -s
Device          1K-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity
/dev/da0s1b       8388608     7324  8381284     0%
pluto# uptime
  2:52PM  up 20:17, 5 users, load averages: 1.26, 4.08, 5.64
pluto#

>From top:

last pid: 46611;  load averages:  1.09,  3.86,  5.53                                                                                                          up 0+20:17:38  14:52:16
1311 processes:9 running, 1301 sleeping, 1 zombie
CPU states:  1.1% user,  0.0% nice,  3.0% system,  0.4% interrupt, 95.6% idle
Mem: 3088M Active, 349M Inact, 313M Wired, 165M Cache, 112M Buf, 27M Free
Swap: 8192M Total, 7268K Used, 8185M Free


----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
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