<snip>
if you want to try the 4G patch then i'd suggest Andrew Morton's -mm tree, which has it included:
http://kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/akpm/patches/2.6/2.6.2-rc2/2.6.2-rc2-mm2/
i've got a 2.4 backport too, included in RHEL3. (the SRPM is
downloadable.) But extracting the patch from this srpm will likely not
apply to a vanilla 2.4 tree - there are lots of other patches as well and interdependencies. So i'd suggest the RHEL3 kernel as-is, or the -mm tree in 2.6.
Ingo </snip>
Of course, as newer kernels are released, Andrew releases newer -mm patches. This patch set solved the I/O problem and let me use 4GB RAM.
Mark Ferlatte wrote:
Daniel Erat said on Thu, Jan 29, 2004 at 08:08:49AM -0800:
I was the poster who initiated the previous thread on this subject. The problem disappeared here after we went down to 2 GB of memory (although we physically removed it from the server rather than passing the arg to the kernel... shouldn't make a difference though, I'd imagine). We went straight from 4 GB to 2 GB, so I can't comment on the results of using 3 GB.
Our problem didn't seem to directly correspond with the 1 GB threshold -- it wouldn't manifest itself until the server had allocated all 4 GB of RAM. After a reboot, it would be nice and speedy again for a day or two until all the memory was being used for buffering again.
This was the behavior I saw as well. I did a bunch of research and source reading before actually figuring out what was going on; it wasn't a well documented bug for some reason... I guess there aren't that many people running large boxes using 2.4.
This makes me think that the problems I saw with 2GB were not related to the IO subsystem, but were something else. Time to go play around a bit; getting those boxes up to 2GB without having to do a kernel patch/upgrade cycle would be nice.
M
-- Benjamin Sherman Software Developer Iowa Interactive, Inc 515-323-3468 x14 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
