From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1423824Ab2LFPQH (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Dec 2012 10:16:07 -0500 Received: from mailout-de.gmx.net ([213.165.64.22]:37793 "HELO mailout-de.gmx.net" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S1423776Ab2LFPQE (ORCPT ); Thu, 6 Dec 2012 10:16:04 -0500 X-Authenticated: #4463548 X-Provags-ID: V01U2FsdGVkX1+L450lK9SLb1I3+NOWLrld5VJwrj52wdPSlEZ+pS zEI6mOMEbALeAS Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2012 17:15:37 +0200 (EET) From: Dimitrios Apostolou X-X-Sender: jimis@soupermouf To: Jan Kara cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy even though swap is unused In-Reply-To: <20121206142044.GB18547@quack.suse.cz> Message-ID: References: <1353851735.22969.18.camel@soupermouf> <1353871800.22969.28.camel@soupermouf> <20121206142044.GB18547@quack.suse.cz> User-Agent: Alpine 2.02 (LFD 1266 2009-07-14) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Y-GMX-Trusted: 0 Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Thu, 6 Dec 2012, Jan Kara wrote: > On Sun 25-11-12 21:30:00, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote: >> 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! > Hmm, it seems commit 4eff96dd5283a102e0c1cac95247090be74a38ed might be > interesting for you. It landed in -stable kernels recently as well if I > remember right... Thanks, I appreciate your help as I'm stuck in a dead end now, and I've been trying to write some debug hook that prints all ext4_inodes and the reason they are pinned (is there an easy way to find this out?). So maybe there is a typo in the SHA1 sum you provided? Gitweb can't find it in Linus' tree. Thanks, Dimitris