Ira Abramov wrote:
>
> the problem is that many times the netscape process leaks over 200Meg of
> swap, but it remains "used" once I kill the process. the RAM is freed,
> but the machine is heavy as hell because it won't free up the swap and
> swap back in all the other apps.
>
> any idea how I force the machine to reclaim swap memory from dead
> processes?
That seems unlikely. Swapped applications cannot run, they have
to be swapped back in for them to run (the appropriate pages
that pagefault, anyhow).
There is no need to _force_ the kernel to reclaim swap space,
as that's kind of meaningless (dead processes, even zombies
already give up their memory, and that obviously includes
swap). There is no actual reason to free up the swap space,
as it's not really getting used right now.
However, it does seem to me that this might go deeper.
Is it just slow, or does it give out any error messages?
Try recompiling the kernel, or anything large enough with
multiple compiler processes (with make -j) and watch the
memory usage and error messages.
The 2.2.x tree (and those before) have a serious memory
handling problem, they don't defragment the memory (or rather,
allocate it in a dumb way - 1 page at a time). Maybe
it's just running out of blocks?
--
/---------------------- Omer Efraim -----------------------\
/--- [EMAIL PROTECTED] (remove spam_me) --------\
| I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world |
| without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, |
| because they'd never expect it. |
\-- Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts ----------------------------/
=================================================================
To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with
the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command
echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
