Messages in this thread | | | Subject | Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused | From | Dimitrios Apostolou <> | Date | Sun, 25 Nov 2012 21:30:00 +0200 |
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On Sun, 2012-11-25 at 15:55 +0200, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: > on an old PIII-500MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, kernel 3.6.6, I started a > backup process (tar|xz -4, nice'd and ionice'd -c3) from ext4 on local > ATA disk to ext3 on external USB disk (USB-2.0 port on PCMCIA card). > Even though earlier system load was minimal, free memory was plenty, the > system now is unresponsive and is thrashing the disk, but the swapfile > is rarely touched.
I'm now having the same experience even though I replaced xz (which needed ~50MB RAM) with gzip. Even though I feel the realtime root shell is a bit more responsive than before, the OOM killer is out killing small processes like syslog-ng and systemd-logind... The ext4_inode_cache slab is taking almost all my memory (117MB). Please advise!
Thanks, Dimitris
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