2.6.24.3-12.fc8 memory issue?

[Peter McNeil]

Frank Cox wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:55:06 +1100
> Peter McNeil <peter at mcneils.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> G'day all,
>>
>> did a yum update this morning which updated the kernel to  
>> 2.6.24.3-12.fc8 then started my IDE and a largish program (java), as 
>> soon as I hit the physical memory limit (2GB) the machine hangs 
>> (freezes) sometimes the mouse freezes too. I have to power down to recover.
>>
>> ...]$ uname -a
>> Linux foo-foo.mcneils.net 2.6.24.3-12.fc8 #1 SMP Tue Feb 26 14:21:30 EST 
>> 2008 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
>>
>> is this a known problem?
>>     
>
> Do you have any swap file(s)?
>
> What is the output of "free" (without the quotes).
>   
Very hard to tell, the machine literally freezes. I'm watching the 
System Monitor while I load the apps and memory goes to 100% swap 
doesn't seem to rise at all.

Right, just sshed into the machine and ran top while I filled the memory 
with java apps and it froze at this point:-

top - 14:13:36 up 29 min,  4 users,  load average: 1.32, 0.56, 0.38
Tasks: 162 total,   1 running, 161 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 18.2%us,  6.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 43.0%id, 32.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.7%si,  
0.0%st
Mem:   2061304k total,  2042936k used,    18368k free,    44764k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,        0k used,  2031608k free,   679356k cached

So swap isn't being used and the memory (inc cache) is filled at the 
point it freezes.