Frequent paging

[Yorvyk]

On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:57:35 -0700
Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Fedorans,
> 
> My workstation has been paging a lot lately. It's a fairly high-end
> system, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.6 GHz (overclocked, originally it was
> 3.0 GHz) and 2x2GB Corsair RAMs.
> 
> lshw output:
> *-memory
>      description: System Memory
>      physical id: 19
>      slot: System board or motherboard
>      size: 4GiB
>    *-bank:0
>         description: DIMM 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
>         physical id: 0
>         slot: A0
>         size: 2GiB
>         width: 64 bits
>         clock: 800MHz (1.2ns)
>    *-bank:2
>         description: DIMM 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
>         physical id: 2
>         slot: A2
>         size: 2GiB
>         width: 64 bits
>         clock: 800MHz (1.2ns)
> 
> and my swap is 6 Gigs.
> 
> $ free -m
>              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
> Mem:          3961       3772        188          0        328       1129
> -/+ buffers/cache:       2315       1645
> Swap:         6143        153       5990
> 
> 
> I used to be able to have uptimes of the order of a month without ever
> using a single Kb of my swap. But lately I start paging from a few Mb to
> several hundred Mb after about half a week. Whenever this happens, I
> find multitasking becomes impossible, e.g. opening a pdf interferes with
> music or video playback.
> 
> I noticed a weak pattern, usually when I find my workstation is paging I
> have a few pdfs open. Lately I have been working with a lot of pdfs and
> most of these pdfs are about thousand page long documents (but only ~
> 20-30 Mb in file size). I keep these open for reference as I work on my
> thesis. However closing evince doesn't help reduce the swap usage (at
> least not within the next 15-20 minutes).
> 
> Apart from these symptoms I also find my system has become generally
> slow. Even opening the terminal or thunar (the XFCE file browser) takes
> a few seconds. I am on 2.6.34.8-68.fc13.x86_64. Does any one have any
> culprits in mind?
> 
There were memory leaks in evince, I don't know if they got fixed.
One problem I saw was, if you zoomed in then out then in, the memory foot print would increase.


-- 
Steve Cook (Yorvyk)

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