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Memory usage problem - solved



Hi,

Thanks to everyone who suggested explanations.
A solution was found empirically, but the reasons are still a bit
obscure.
Turned out that the problem had to do with the huge swap I used. A while
ago one of the users asked me for extra swap space on that machine, to
run some particularly memory demanding calculations. I used several swap
partitions and swap files that added up to a total of more than 1G swap
(in addition to 256MB RAM).
Apparently managing all that swap caused severe memory problems, though
the reason for that isn't clear to me. Anyway, I played with it a little
bit, and managed to stabilize it with about 512M swap on 4 swap
partitions.
If anyone cares to guess what the actual reason for the problem was, I'm
still very curious to hear an explanation.

While we're at it - If one does need very large swap, there is a problem
with the limits. Swap partitions are limited to less than 130M, and the
number of them is also limited (to about 5 I think) trying to 'swapon'
more partitions results in 'device unknown' (or something similar)
errors. That forces one to use swap files, which is really ugly. Any way
to use larger swap partitions, or many of them?!

Tuvik

--
_______________________________________
             Tuvik Beker
        becket@shum.huji.ac.il
 Tel. 03-5714436       Fax. 03-5334349
_______________________________________