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Booting without swap or make debian knows my swapI just broke one disk which contained the swap partition of my system. Bookmark/Search this post with: |
Booting without swap or make debian knows my swap
On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 11:07:42AM +0700, Ms Linuz wrote:
> I just broke one disk which contained the swap partition of my system.
> Lucky me, the other disk that holds my file system is ok.
> But somehow I can't boot. It looks like the system trying to find out
> the lost swap.
> I've already created a new swap partition and changed the /etc/fstab
> so the swap will refer to my new swap ( edited with Knoppix ).
> But still the system seems trying to look for the old swap.
> So anyone knows a quick way to make my system knows my new swap ?
> Grub is used a boot manager.
Boot with init=/bin/sh. You'll get a shell with / mount ro, only.
Then you can check /etc/fstab, then run the init scripts one at a time.
Doug.
--
Booting without swap or make debian knows my swap
2007/4/7, Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>:
On Sat, Apr 07, 2007 at 11:07:42AM +0700, Ms Linuz wrote:> I just broke one disk which contained the swap partition of my system.> Lucky me, the other disk that holds my file system is ok.> But somehow I can't boot. It looks like the system trying to find out
> the lost swap.> I've already created a new swap partition and changed the /etc/fstab> so the swap will refer to my new swap ( edited with Knoppix ).> But still the system seems trying to look for the old swap.
> So anyone knows a quick way to make my system knows my new swap ?> Grub is used a boot manager.Boot with init=/bin/sh. You'll get a shell with / mount ro, only.Then you can check /etc/fstab, then run the init scripts one at a time.
Doug.Well..re-installing ;-) --To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to
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swap
Is it conceivable to add a low-quality 300GB HD (for
swap file) to a raid1 system?
The system consists of
---Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE mother board
---Two WD Raptor 150GB each
---Two Dual Opteron
---16 GB ram
In computations, I can presently offer 96GB as swap
(my home), though it is not enough. Actually I started
my system with two Maxtor HD 300GB each, though, on
long runs, they proved incompatible with the mother
board and had to be replaced.
Thanks for advice
francesco pietra
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--
swap
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On 05/07/07 04:53, Francesco Pietra wrote:
> Is it conceivable to add a low-quality 300GB HD (for
> swap file) to a raid1 system?
>
> The system consists of
>
> ---Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE mother board
> ---Two WD Raptor 150GB each
> ---Two Dual Opteron
> ---16 GB ram
>
> In computations, I can presently offer 96GB as swap
> (my home), though it is not enough. Actually I started
> my system with two Maxtor HD 300GB each, though, on
> long runs, they proved incompatible with the mother
> board and had to be replaced.
>
> Thanks for advice
96 GIGABYTES of swap space????????????????????????????
If that's not enough, you need a very large, expensive SPARC or
Superdome system.
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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--
swap
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Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 05/07/07 04:53, Francesco Pietra wrote:
>> Is it conceivable to add a low-quality 300GB HD (for
>> swap file) to a raid1 system?
>
>> The system consists of
>
>> ---Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE mother board
>> ---Two WD Raptor 150GB each
>> ---Two Dual Opteron
>> ---16 GB ram
>
>> In computations, I can presently offer 96GB as swap
>> (my home), though it is not enough. Actually I started
>> my system with two Maxtor HD 300GB each, though, on
>> long runs, they proved incompatible with the mother
>> board and had to be replaced.
>
>> Thanks for advice
>
> 96 GIGABYTES of swap space????????????????????????????
>
> If that's not enough, you need a very large, expensive SPARC or
> Superdome system.
>
I agree, I can't think of any application off the top of my head that
would need that much memory. Somehow I think it's a typo and should be
96 MB, but who knows.
Joe
- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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--
swap
On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 05:24 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
> Hash: SHA1
>
> On 05/07/07 04:53, Francesco Pietra wrote:
> > Is it conceivable to add a low-quality 300GB HD (for
> > swap file) to a raid1 system?
> >
> > The system consists of
> >
> > ---Tyan S2895 Thunder K8WE mother board
> > ---Two WD Raptor 150GB each
> > ---Two Dual Opteron
> > ---16 GB ram
> >
> > In computations, I can presently offer 96GB as swap
> > (my home), though it is not enough. Actually I started
> > my system with two Maxtor HD 300GB each, though, on
> > long runs, they proved incompatible with the mother
> > board and had to be replaced.
> >
> > Thanks for advice
>
> 96 GIGABYTES of swap space????????????????????????????
>
> If that's not enough, you need a very large, expensive SPARC or
> Superdome system.
I've part-time admin'd (contracted) a couple of systems that required
128GB of swap during batch processing "middle of the night" setups.
Primarily because of the inner looping of some of the jobs and the
amount of "stored" info hanging in memory. Rather than fix the batch
processing system, which came from an AS400 (which originally was on an
IBM 36 system), the company suggested swap as a workaround.
This is a medical billing system that has been around since... the 70's
and has only been extended and never "refactored" or optimized. The
reason being, they are afraid that the system will break. Being written
in COBOL and some kind of JPL.
Lets just say that the whole batching thing could easily be done
dynamically, but would require a huge amount of work to re-factor and
optimize the code for machines being produced now-a-day. But the fact
that this package cost upward of $500K for maintenance per year per
machine running it, says a lot doesn't it. Its a milker.
--
greg,
PGP key: 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Alternate Fingerprint: 09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0
swap
On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> I've part-time admin'd (contracted) a couple of systems that required
> 128GB of swap during batch processing "middle of the night" setups.
> Primarily because of the inner looping of some of the jobs and the
> amount of "stored" info hanging in memory. Rather than fix the batch
> processing system, which came from an AS400 (which originally was on an
> IBM 36 system), the company suggested swap as a workaround.
How much memory and swap did the program have to play with on an AS400
or 36?
To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
cluster that looks like a bigger computer? For me its just an
intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
up.
Doug.
--
swap
On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 12:15 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > I've part-time admin'd (contracted) a couple of systems that required
> > 128GB of swap during batch processing "middle of the night" setups.
> > Primarily because of the inner looping of some of the jobs and the
> > amount of "stored" info hanging in memory. Rather than fix the batch
> > processing system, which came from an AS400 (which originally was on an
> > IBM 36 system), the company suggested swap as a workaround.
>
> How much memory and swap did the program have to play with on an AS400
> or 36?
Things are allocated differently on the AS400 and different differently
on the 36. There really isn't a way compare them, easily. Plus the
"extending" has had deleterious effects on the currently supported
implementations. They no longer support the "other" platforms as they
don't have enough experience with them. They are trying to move
everything to "Windows" as that is what everyone is asking for.
> To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
> what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
> cluster that looks like a bigger computer? For me its just an
> intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
> up.
Cluster? HA! Bigger Single computer? HA!
They have 8 processor machines with 64GB of memory already. The batch
process can only utilize 1 processor. The other 7 processors, are
basically idle. I've trended the entire machine for them. If they could
LPAR the machine(s) out, they'd be marvelously happy. But they would
need to get the memory upto 512MB or better and then multi-path IO for
the swap... sheesh. It would be cheaper to just buy another machine and
add it, but then they already have 3 hours at worst, 4 hours at best, of
growth left.
In any case, a "pre-batch" program assigns jobs to each machine, it
takes nearly an hour to estimate loads. Again single processor usage.
This whole package was never meant to scale. But it has been forced to.
It also was meant to be a temporary fix until a new system was to be
spec'd and written. Nothing ever came of the effort in the 70's and was
dropped when this was "good enough".
--
greg,
PGP key: 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
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swap
On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 01:07:23PM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 12:15 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> Cluster? HA! Bigger Single computer? HA!
>
> They have 8 processor machines with 64GB of memory already. The batch
> process can only utilize 1 processor. The other 7 processors, are
> basically idle. I've trended the entire machine for them. If they could
> LPAR the machine(s) out, they'd be marvelously happy. But they would
> need to get the memory upto 512MB or better and then multi-path IO for
> the swap... sheesh. It would be cheaper to just buy another machine and
> add it, but then they already have 3 hours at worst, 4 hours at best, of
> growth left.
>
> In any case, a "pre-batch" program assigns jobs to each machine, it
> takes nearly an hour to estimate loads. Again single processor usage.
>
> This whole package was never meant to scale. But it has been forced to.
> It also was meant to be a temporary fix until a new system was to be
> spec'd and written. Nothing ever came of the effort in the 70's and was
> dropped when this was "good enough".
I suppose the holy-grail would be something that does for CPUs in boxes
what LVM does for disks: Allow a single-threaded process to utilize
multiple CPUs for more speed, those CPUs able to be both within one box,
and spread: a CPU pool and a memory pool.
The focus for a while seems to have been how to divide up a big computer
in to several smaller virtual servers (ala xen or IBM's LPARs). I
haven't kept up on efforts to solve a massivly sequential problem.
However, my interest is aroused.
If you have a box with 8 processors and your process can only use one,
can you use something like Xen, designate one whole processor and its
memory to your main process and use the other processors as helpers?
(maybe you don't need Xen for that, I don't know).
For example, if the process needs more memory and therefore uses swap,
and the MB is maxed out for memory, could another processor be used by
the OS to manage a multi-disk swap farm? Put another way, if a linux
box can serve data to saturate a gigabit ethernet, and it is possible to
create a block device that looks like a disk that really gets its data
over ethernet from another computer, can an 8-way MB take that input
and present a virtual swap device to one processor so that swap
functions at the same speed as memory?
I guess that's called a mainframe :)
Greg, I'm just babling on this. If you have links for reading I could
do, I'd appreciate it. Then I may at least know what I'm babbling
about.
Thanks,
Doug.
--
swap
On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 10:16:30AM -0700, ann kok wrote:
> In the doc. the swap should be twice of the memory
> When I have 4G memory, I create 8G swap
>
> ls it right?
>
Sort of. It should read "twice the amount of memory, up to 1 GB of
swap." In general, you should *never* need that amount of swap. There
was a recent thread where Greg Folkert mentioned a situation which he
encountered where a system had 128 GB of swap. That is *extremely*
rare. So, unless you are running massive batch jobs overnight which
will greatly exceed your available physical memory, 1GB of swap should
be more than sufficient.
Regards,
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sánchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com
swap
On Thu, 10 May 2007 16:19:04 -0400
Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 10:16:30AM -0700, ann kok wrote:
> > In the doc. the swap should be twice of the memory
> > When I have 4G memory, I create 8G swap
> >
> > ls it right?
> >
> Sort of. It should read "twice the amount of memory, up to 1 GB of
> swap." In general, you should *never* need that amount of swap. There
$ swapon -s
Filename Type Size Used Priority
/dev/hda7 partition 1485972 0 -1
This was setup by the installer (guided partitioning; the system has
512MB RAM). I complained about it in my install report [0]. Franz
replied:
> 5) I'm also curious about the partition sizes chosen by the installer -
> is as much as 1.5 GB (out of 27 GB total, on a system with 512 MB RAM)
> really the recommended amount? I suppose some people use beryl instead
> of Xfce, though :).
Guided partitioning sets an upper limit of 300% memory size for swap
partitions. It is true that that is somewhat high for system with a lot
of internal memory. However, it does not do any harm either.
[snip]
> -Roberto
[0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=410328
Celejar
--
mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email
ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator
Encrypted Swap -- Loop Devices
I am having difficulty getting encrypted swap to enable on boot. Can anyone
offer any suggestions?
#
/dev/hda2 none swap sw,loop=/dev/loop0,encryption=AES256
0 0
After boot /dev/loop exists but /dev/loop0 to /dev/loop7 do not exist.
# ls /dev/loo*
0
# swapon -a
swapon: unable to open loop device /dev/loop0
After I execute "losetup -a", /dev/loop0 to /dev/loop7 then exist
and "swapon -a" mounts the swap.
# losetup -a
# ls /dev/loo*
/dev/loop0 /dev/loop1 /dev/loop2 /dev/loop3 /dev/loop4 /dev/loop5 /dev/loop6 /dev/loop7
/dev/loop:
0
# swapon -a
Setting up swapspace version 1, size = 1077501 kB
no label, UUID=b9e78291-ebe5-41e9-8ed3-c65324260818
Sorry about not including boot error messages but I don't seem to be logging.
#more /var/log/boot
(Nothing has been logged yet.)
and the only reference to swap in /var/log/messages is its recreation after I
had scrubbed the partition.
May 10 22:54:32 localhost kernel: Adding 1052244k swap on /dev/loop0.
Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1052244k
Thankyou,
- Adam Wakerhauser
--
swap
On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 15:39 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 01:07:23PM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 12:15 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > Cluster? HA! Bigger Single computer? HA!
> >
> > They have 8 processor machines with 64GB of memory already. The batch
> > process can only utilize 1 processor. The other 7 processors, are
> > basically idle. I've trended the entire machine for them. If they could
> > LPAR the machine(s) out, they'd be marvelously happy. But they would
> > need to get the memory upto 512MB or better and then multi-path IO for
> > the swap... sheesh. It would be cheaper to just buy another machine and
> > add it, but then they already have 3 hours at worst, 4 hours at best, of
> > growth left.
> >
> > In any case, a "pre-batch" program assigns jobs to each machine, it
> > takes nearly an hour to estimate loads. Again single processor usage.
> >
> > This whole package was never meant to scale. But it has been forced to.
> > It also was meant to be a temporary fix until a new system was to be
> > spec'd and written. Nothing ever came of the effort in the 70's and was
> > dropped when this was "good enough".
>
> I suppose the holy-grail would be something that does for CPUs in boxes
> what LVM does for disks: Allow a single-threaded process to utilize
> multiple CPUs for more speed, those CPUs able to be both within one box,
> and spread: a CPU pool and a memory pool.
That is pretty much what IBMs LPAR of AS/400 and AIX (and other
hypervisor setups) do. Unfortunately, this company was "sold" a
sooper-dooper machine in a deal for 2 of them. They would have spent
more on smaller machines. But, IBM has sales quotas and deal deadlines
for sales people. Forklift upgrades, full cabinet deals are pretty much
the norm when it comes to the sales department. IOW, push more hardware,
period, they'll eventually be suckers for upgrades.
> The focus for a while seems to have been how to divide up a big computer
> in to several smaller virtual servers (ala xen or IBM's LPARs). I
> haven't kept up on efforts to solve a massivly sequential problem.
> However, my interest is aroused.
Massively sequential problems are very, very, very difficult to
parallize. Even vectored processor systems balk and fail badly at
massively sequential problems.
> If you have a box with 8 processors and your process can only use one,
> can you use something like Xen, designate one whole processor and its
> memory to your main process and use the other processors as helpers?
> (maybe you don't need Xen for that, I don't know).
Yes, you could, but that is why I mentioned they would need 512GB+ of
RAM and serious multi-pathing to the IO to get sufficient bottle neck
reduction. It would be cheaper to just add smaller more "commoditized"
systems aka "Linux" which the software vendor is still resisting. Or
even just to add 2 processor AIX systems with 64GB of memory.
> For example, if the process needs more memory and therefore uses swap,
> and the MB is maxed out for memory, could another processor be used by
> the OS to manage a multi-disk swap farm? Put another way, if a linux
> box can serve data to saturate a gigabit ethernet, and it is possible to
> create a block device that looks like a disk that really gets its data
> over ethernet from another computer, can an 8-way MB take that input
> and present a virtual swap device to one processor so that swap
> functions at the same speed as memory?
Wow, you have three ideas in one paragraph there.
First off, let me tell you a bit more about the processing that goes on.
First off, the "primary" machine goes through and does an estimate on
the number of records pulled for each "billing job". It then assigns (in
the DB) which defined machine will do what jobs. Each of these machines
are defined with "capacity" info built into the script to determine the
"amount" of work possible. Its a huge SWAG, that is tweaked until right,
over the course of a few weeks.
This then kicks off the processing of the previous days records. Each
machine ALL of its daily info into memory, this of course creates a big
problem... the 36 and AS/400 systems did not do this, they used
piece-meal in methods. This behavior was changed during the conversion
to use AIX. The static data in memory of course swaps out. This was
causing the behavior of the machines becoming lethargic and not able to
complete the processing in DAYS, falling further and further behind.
Add enough swap to "cover" the anemic amount of working room problems
fixed the lethargy. Though a back hack, it does work. Though, adding
machines would be easier on the amount of memory required per machine to
use, remember they were "sold" expensive systems. To much to allow for
smaller machine that could actually work better.
Now, idea number one. Multi-disk swap farm, already done, I've spread
the swap out over multiple disks on the SSA channels/chains using
logical extents with a policy of striping across multiple disk with
contiguous allocations per disk. This gives near instant response,
though it is still many magnitudes slower then memory.
Idea number two. Using Gig-E with ATAOE or iSCSI, only gets you "about"
90-95MB/sec, providing you have TCP Offload Enabled(TOE) NICs on both
ends. And to really be anything close to be able to do swap as quickly
as I have it configured on the AIX machines, you'd need 8 or more bonded
TOE NICs on each end... assuming either end can transfer the data over
the "data bus". For commodity Linux machines, this is the Peered PCI
bus. For the AIX machine... I think (I'll have to verify, but I just am
using for example), nope... I ain't got it. But basically both ends have
to have the capacity to transfer the data to get the speeds. Only that
bonding with TOE NICs is not really a good idea as it defeats many of
the advantages of TOE in the first place.
And finally idea number three. Using memory as swap... It is a good
idea... but then, the whole purpose of swap was that memory was not
sufficient enough to provide enough working room. Going above 64GB of
memory on ANY machine is not cheap. Not cheap at all. If I were going to
use it as swap, I just assume use it as REAL working memory. AIX really
doesn't have a set-in-stone maximum amount of memory it can support, so
to use REALLY expensive memory as swap, I'd fire myself for doing that.
Nice idea on paper, but in reality... not viable.
> I guess that's called a mainframe :)
No, mainframes are not really that "capable" as a holy grail to set your
sights on. Yes they operate on a different set of standards, but over
all, they were designed to handle large amounts of input and output in a
very reasonable way. They really don't do computing any better or worse
(subjective, yes, I know) than any other systems. The only real thing
mainframes do better than many other systems, that I know of, is COST a
lot of money to maintain and upgrade.
> Greg, I'm just babling on this. If you have links for reading I could
> do, I'd appreciate it. Then I may at least know what I'm babbling
> about.
IBM has a lot of goodies on publib
http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/eserver/
Have fun reading *FOREVER*,
I mean that literally. And if you have enough time you can also
checkout:
http://www.elink.ibmlink.ibm.com/publications/servlet/pbi.wss
For even more IBM publications.
--
greg,
PGP key: 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Alternate Fingerprint: 09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0
swap
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On 05/10/07 16:12, Greg Folkert wrote:
[snip]
>
>> I guess that's called a mainframe :)
>
> No, mainframes are not really that "capable" as a holy grail to set your
> sights on. Yes they operate on a different set of standards, but over
> all, they were designed to handle large amounts of input and output in a
> very reasonable way. They really don't do computing any better or worse
> (subjective, yes, I know) than any other systems. The only real thing
> mainframes do better than many other systems, that I know of, is COST a
> lot of money to maintain and upgrade.
Did you just contradict yourself? They're *great* at IO. And
they're durable.
Does AIX have batch queues?
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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--
swap
On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 17:22 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 05/10/07 16:12, Greg Folkert wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> >> I guess that's called a mainframe :)
> >
> > No, mainframes are not really that "capable" as a holy grail to set your
> > sights on. Yes they operate on a different set of standards, but over
> > all, they were designed to handle large amounts of input and output in a
> > very reasonable way. They really don't do computing any better or worse
> > (subjective, yes, I know) than any other systems. The only real thing
> > mainframes do better than many other systems, that I know of, is COST a
> > lot of money to maintain and upgrade.
>
> Did you just contradict yourself? They're *great* at IO. And
> they're durable.
Durable, through HUGE maintenance contracts. Though...
I should have said:
Besides IO, the only real thing mainframes do better than many
other systems, that I know of, is COST a lot of money to
maintain and upgrade.
Some costs I have seen in the past, associated with "mainframes":
* $50K just to get TCP/IP enabled on a single network interface.
* $120K to enable another, already there, processor.
* $60K to "update" the disk IO scheduler, that was mistakenly
ordered with the wrong configuration
I could mention others, I don't have all day. These were all done in
about 30 minutes after a P.O. was cut and faxed.
> Does AIX have batch queues?
This response intentionally left blank.
--
greg,
PGP key: 1024D/B524687C 2003-08-05
Fingerprint: E1D3 E3D7 5850 957E FED0 2B3A ED66 6971 B524 687C
Alternate Fingerprint: 09F9 1102 9D74 E35B D841 56C5 6356 88C0
swap
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On 05/11/07 06:42, Greg Folkert wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 17:22 -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
>> On 05/10/07 16:12, Greg Folkert wrote:
>> [snip]
>>>> I guess that's called a mainframe :)
>>> No, mainframes are not really that "capable" as a holy grail to set your
>>> sights on. Yes they operate on a different set of standards, but over
>>> all, they were designed to handle large amounts of input and output in a
>>> very reasonable way. They really don't do computing any better or worse
>>> (subjective, yes, I know) than any other systems. The only real thing
>>> mainframes do better than many other systems, that I know of, is COST a
>>> lot of money to maintain and upgrade.
>> Did you just contradict yourself? They're *great* at IO. And
>> they're durable.
>
> Durable, through HUGE maintenance contracts. Though...
>
> I should have said:
>
> Besides IO, the only real thing mainframes do better than many
> other systems, that I know of, is COST a lot of money to
> maintain and upgrade.
>
> Some costs I have seen in the past, associated with "mainframes":
>
> * $50K just to get TCP/IP enabled on a single network interface.
> * $120K to enable another, already there, processor.
> * $60K to "update" the disk IO scheduler, that was mistakenly
> ordered with the wrong configuration
>
> I could mention others, I don't have all day. These were all done in
> about 30 minutes after a P.O. was cut and faxed.
You're absolutely correct.
But they must be of some corporate benefit, because otherwise they'd
have been replaced by big Alphas & SPARCs.
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 05:12:23PM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 15:39 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 01:07:23PM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > > On Mon, 2007-05-07 at 12:15 -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > > > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
>
> > I suppose the holy-grail would be something that does for CPUs in boxes
> > what LVM does for disks: Allow a single-threaded process to utilize
> > multiple CPUs for more speed, those CPUs able to be both within one box,
> > and spread: a CPU pool and a memory pool.
>
> That is pretty much what IBMs LPAR of AS/400 and AIX (and other
> hypervisor setups) do.
You mean that with LPARs you can designate 10 processors to a job and
the job will think its running on a single super-dooper processor?
> Unfortunately, this company was "sold" a
> sooper-dooper machine in a deal for 2 of them. They would have spent
> more on smaller machines. But, IBM has sales quotas and deal deadlines
> for sales people. Forklift upgrades, full cabinet deals are pretty much
> the norm when it comes to the sales department. IOW, push more hardware,
> period, they'll eventually be suckers for upgrades.
>
> > The focus for a while seems to have been how to divide up a big computer
> > in to several smaller virtual servers (ala xen or IBM's LPARs). I
> > haven't kept up on efforts to solve a massivly sequential problem.
> > However, my interest is aroused.
>
> Massively sequential problems are very, very, very difficult to
> parallize. Even vectored processor systems balk and fail badly at
> massively sequential problems.
> And finally idea number three. Using memory as swap... It is a good
> idea... but then, the whole purpose of swap was that memory was not
> sufficient enough to provide enough working room. Going above 64GB of
> memory on ANY machine is not cheap. Not cheap at all. If I were going to
> use it as swap, I just assume use it as REAL working memory. AIX really
> doesn't have a set-in-stone maximum amount of memory it can support, so
> to use REALLY expensive memory as swap, I'd fire myself for doing that.
> Nice idea on paper, but in reality... not viable.
>
I guess I wasn't clear. I wasn't suggesting to use memory as swap. I
was wondering about ways to get swap that was faster than a disk array
and wondering if it could be farmed out to other boxes and present
something which could be swapped to faster (ideally approaching memory
speed). For example, if your box _was_ maxxed out on memory but the
program still wanted to pull in _all_ the data to memory at once and it
wouldn't fit, so it swaps; then what if you had something like a SAN
that could present a block device that functioned as fast as memory,
this block device actually being run by (an)other processor(s) on the
same machine?
BTW, the load the whole file into memory but it doesn't fit problem is
_exactly_ the problem I have on both my 486 (32 MB ram) and PI (64 MB
ram).
For a long time I've been intreguied by the problems of solving
sequential problems that can not be parralized. Paralized solutions
seem to be relativly old hat with things like beowolf clusters and for
that matter Cray clusters. But what does a computer designed from the
outset to solve a sequential problem look like? What does the fastest
single processor look like and what does it need to operate at full
speed. Someone once said (I forgot who or where I hear/read it) that
the job of a supercomputer was to turn compute-bound jobs into IO-bound
jobs. If you can get the IO (disk, memory, network, whatever) to keep
up with the processor the job becomes compute-bound again.
So can you make a single virtual processor (emulator?), that may run on many
real physical processors, that runs faster (compute-wise, e.g. FLOPS not
MHz) than any existing single physical processor? Even for a sequential
program, the internal workings of a CPU are paralelized; could that be
used to advantage?
> IBM has a lot of goodies on publib
>
> http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/eserver/
>
> Have fun reading *FOREVER*,
> I mean that literally. And if you have enough time you can also
> checkout:
>
> http://www.elink.ibmlink.ibm.com/publications/servlet/pbi.wss
>
> For even more IBM publications.
I fell in love with redbooks when I ran OS/2 (my version was not Y2K+1
capable and I couldn't afford to replace it, which brought me to Linux
via a $20 old stock "teach yourself redhat in 24 hrs book". Redhat's
next upgrade wouldn't install on my 486, the same 486 that Etch now
won't install on. On to BSD for that box.
Since I got internet, I've been a regular mooch at ibm's site. Great
stuff.
I didn't have the chance to play with computers in school, other than
OS/2 and REXX on my home box, and certainly never an AIX box or anything
bigger. Thanks for humouring me.
Doug.
--
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On 05/10/07 18:10, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>
> I guess I wasn't clear. I wasn't suggesting to use memory as swap. I
> was wondering about ways to get swap that was faster than a disk array
> and wondering if it could be farmed out to other boxes and present
> something which could be swapped to faster (ideally approaching memory
> speed). For example, if your box _was_ maxxed out on memory but the
> program still wanted to pull in _all_ the data to memory at once and it
> wouldn't fit, so it swaps; then what if you had something like a SAN
> that could present a block device that functioned as fast as memory,
> this block device actually being run by (an)other processor(s) on the
> same machine?
*If* you had such a device, it would be *great*. But you don't.
It's impossible, if for no other reasons than that the rotational
speeds of disks (3 microseconds) are many orders of magnitude slower
than the access speed of RAM (80 nanoseconds, many many years ago).
And if you say "make a SSD", then I say that it's still slower than
RAM because disk channel bandwidth is still *much* slower than
memory bandwidth. Better to spend that money on extra RAM.
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 08:14:11PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
> On 05/10/07 18:10, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> [snip]
> >
> And if you say "make a SSD", then I say that it's still slower than
> RAM because disk channel bandwidth is still *much* slower than
> memory bandwidth. Better to spend that money on extra RAM.
>
But if the problem/program can only run on one processor, and you have
maxxed out the memory that that processor (or the MB it's on) can
handle...
I've been trying to find (e.g. google, ibm) information on
supercomputers/HPC that are built to solve sequential problems and
striking out. Everything is on paralellization and how clusters don't
help if you can't make it a parallel problem.
The other tack I've been thinking is what if you could make a virtual
computer that ran on more than one CPU/node that was _more_ powerful
(compute, memory, whatever) than any one CPU/node. This would be the
direct opposite of the current virtualization of a guest being a subset
of the host (e.g. Xen, z/VM). The problem here is that, unlike Xen, it
would require a true emulation rather than passing code directly to a
processor.
Other than your bach job, I wonder what would be an example of a current
real-world sequential compute problem; a long-running program that
couldn't be run in parallel on multiple nodes.
Doug.
--
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On 05/10/07 22:11, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 08:14:11PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
>> On 05/10/07 18:10, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
>> [snip]
>
>> And if you say "make a SSD", then I say that it's still slower than
>> RAM because disk channel bandwidth is still *much* slower than
>> memory bandwidth. Better to spend that money on extra RAM.
>>
>
> But if the problem/program can only run on one processor, and you have
> maxxed out the memory that that processor (or the MB it's on) can
> handle...
Then you've run into an unfixable bottleneck and are SOL.
> I've been trying to find (e.g. google, ibm) information on
> supercomputers/HPC that are built to solve sequential problems and
> striking out. Everything is on paralellization and how clusters don't
> help if you can't make it a parallel problem.
>
> The other tack I've been thinking is what if you could make a virtual
> computer that ran on more than one CPU/node that was _more_ powerful
> (compute, memory, whatever) than any one CPU/node. This would be the
> direct opposite of the current virtualization of a guest being a subset
> of the host (e.g. Xen, z/VM). The problem here is that, unlike Xen, it
> would require a true emulation rather than passing code directly to a
> processor.
>
> Other than your bach job, I wonder what would be an example of a current
> real-world sequential compute problem; a long-running program that
> couldn't be run in parallel on multiple nodes.
Certain weather simulations are not parallel because the subsequent
iteration is dependent on the value of the current iteration.
In fact, by definition, iterative numerical methods are serial.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iterative_method
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton-Raphson_method
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:55:56AM -0400, Greg Folkert wrote:
> > I've part-time admin'd (contracted) a couple of systems that required
> > 128GB of swap during batch processing "middle of the night" setups.
> > Primarily because of the inner looping of some of the jobs and the
> > amount of "stored" info hanging in memory. Rather than fix the batch
> > processing system, which came from an AS400 (which originally was on an
> > IBM 36 system), the company suggested swap as a workaround.
>
> How much memory and swap did the program have to play with on an AS400
> or 36?
>
> To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
> what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
> cluster that looks like a bigger computer? For me its just an
> intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
> up.
>
> Doug.
Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
running besides X?
Celejar
--
mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email
ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator
--
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Celejar wrote:
> On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>> To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
>> what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
>> cluster that looks like a bigger computer? For me its just an
>> intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
>> with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
>> up.
>>
>> Doug.
>
> Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
> even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
> running besides X?
>
> Celejar
I have to concur. I have 1GB and never see any swapping. I was
actually contemplating removing the swap, but decided to leave it
because disk space is cheap. On another machine that only has 256MB of
ram, it does occasionally use some swap space, but even on that machine
it is rare.
I run several apps at the same time. Currently there are 105 processes
running, although most are sleeping according to top.
Joe
- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 04:12:22PM +0200, Joe Hart wrote:
> Celejar wrote:
> > On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> > Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> [snip]
> >> intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> >> with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
> >> up.
> >
> > Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
> > even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
> > running besides X?
> >
> I have to concur. I have 1GB and never see any swapping. I was
> actually contemplating removing the swap, but decided to leave it
> because disk space is cheap. On another machine that only has 256MB of
> ram, it does occasionally use some swap space, but even on that machine
> it is rare.
>
> I run several apps at the same time. Currently there are 105 processes
> running, although most are sleeping according to top.
Are you on i386 or amd64? I'm wondering how memory gets packed when
things are 64-bit instead of 32-bit; do some things take twice as much
memory?
The only time I see swap is with an X browser. Doesn't matter Konq,
Mozilla/galeon/whatever. link2 is OK.
In fact, it was poor browser performance (read inability to view some
sites) that was the drive to buy my new box. For everything else, my
IBM 486 was more than adequate. It annoyed me that I had to buy a new
box to do something as simple as look at a weather map or satelite photo
but onwards and upwards...
Thanks,
Doug.
--
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On Tue, 8 May 2007 10:28:02 -0400
Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[snip]
> In fact, it was poor browser performance (read inability to view some
> sites) that was the drive to buy my new box. For everything else, my
> IBM 486 was more than adequate. It annoyed me that I had to buy a new
> box to do something as simple as look at a weather map or satelite photo
> but onwards and upwards...
You're probably more technically adept than I, but even on my k6, lots
of things other than web browsers are unpleasant. X startup is very
slow, and aptitude is unbearable, for example.
> Thanks,
>
> Doug.
Celejar
--
mailmin.sourceforge.net - remote access via secure (OpenPGP) email
ssuds.sourceforge.net - A Simple Sudoku Solver and Generator
--
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On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 10:33:26AM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> On Tue, 8 May 2007 10:28:02 -0400
> Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
>
> [snip]
>
> > In fact, it was poor browser performance (read inability to view some
> > sites) that was the drive to buy my new box. For everything else, my
> > IBM 486 was more than adequate. It annoyed me that I had to buy a new
> > box to do something as simple as look at a weather map or satelite photo
> > but onwards and upwards...
>
> You're probably more technically adept than I, but even on my k6, lots
> of things other than web browsers are unpleasant. X startup is very
> slow, and aptitude is unbearable, for example.
>
Isn't it sad that aptitude wasn't written to be easier on old hardware?
I've written python apps that parse files bigger than aptitude does, I
just don't try to pull the whole file into memory to do it; I trust the
kernel and C libs to provide adequate buffering without impacting the
whole system.
X started up in about 30 seconds; not a big deal if its solid and I only
have to do it once a day. A huge deal if I have to do it every 20
minutes.
My PII isn't much faster than my 486 thanks to 1) good design on IBM's
part [better IDE hardware caching for example] and 2) poorer design on
Asus's part for the PII.
Doug.
--
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Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>> I run several apps at the same time. Currently there are 105 processes
>> running, although most are sleeping according to top.
>
> Are you on i386 or amd64? I'm wondering how memory gets packed when
> things are 64-bit instead of 32-bit; do some things take twice as much
> memory?
>
I have both on this AMD64 system, but I find myself most of the time
using the 32 bit version of (ahem) Sidux. Why? Because the multimedia
codecs are available. Although I have read that the new version of
ffmpeg can handle the windows media format, so it is possible that I
will abandon the 32-bit system for the AMD64. I know that it will suck
more memory, just by the way the system is designed, but I think that
packages being compiled for a 64 bit system on a 64 bit system will work
at least marginally faster than packages compiled for 486, which is what
most of the packages are compiled for.
As for swap space, even in the AMD64 version of Etch that I have, it
doesn't need to use the swap (and it is the same swap partition).
> The only time I see swap is with an X browser. Doesn't matter Konq,
> Mozilla/galeon/whatever. link2 is OK.
>
Interesting. You said you have 1GB of RAM. I would think that you can
do an experiment by turning off the swap and seeing what happens. Worse
case you'll have to reboot (I would think).
> In fact, it was poor browser performance (read inability to view some
> sites) that was the drive to buy my new box. For everything else, my
> IBM 486 was more than adequate. It annoyed me that I had to buy a new
> box to do something as simple as look at a weather map or satelite photo
> but onwards and upwards...
Yes, todays browsers are far more demanding, mainly due to the large
amount of media that they need to be able to handle. HTML has also
gotten a lot more complicated, thus the rendering engines need to be
more powerful.
I really dislike the way modern sites overuse the and format
themselves so they only show a fixed resolution. But there isn't much I
can do about it.
Joe
- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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On 05/08/07 11:46, Joe Hart wrote:
[snip]
> Interesting. You said you have 1GB of RAM. I would think that you can
> do an experiment by turning off the swap and seeing what happens. Worse
> case you'll have to reboot (I would think).
swapon
swapoff
- --
Ron Johnson, Jr.
Jefferson LA USA
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day.
Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good!
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On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:00:50PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
> > what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
> > cluster that looks like a bigger computer? For me its just an
> > intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> > with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns me
> > up.
> Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
> even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
> running besides X?
>
Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
Then click on "Our Team".
I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
it thrashes, but...
Before I tried to upgrade my 486, it was running Sarge but needed the
version 3 xserver-s3. I ran icewm and ssh'd to the Athlon box (running
Etch) and ran Konq via ssh. Worked fine. 486 has 32 MB ram, S3 has 1
MB video ram.
Since the 486 upgrade didn't work, I reassembled my PII box (called
rocky since the CPU fan bearing is dead and sounds like a gravel truck),
installed Etch, with Xorg. It has 64 MB ram, the Trident video has 4 MB
video ram.
Eventually (almost immediatly on that site), Xorg hogs so much memory
that the box starts thrashing then totally freezes up: Ctrl-Alt-BS does
nothing (even after waiting an hour), ssh in doesn't work. All I can do
is pull the plug. This is with just Xorg running on the PII with Konq
running on the Athlon via a ssh link.
I has been my sad experience that the focus on development seems to be
on supporting the latest and greatest with no focus on continuing
support for earlier and lesser (by some measures), and sometimes quality
takes a back seat to a feature/support list. This seems most to refer
to stuff outside of debian's direct control: debian doesn't write the
kernel, doesn't write Xorg. However, they did make aptitude that grabs
(on the i386 PII) 57MB of virtual memory.
I really liked woody. My 486 ran like a dream. The problem is that
it's always onward and upward if you want to maintain security support.
The 486 (called reliant since its a solid IBM [inside _and_ out] that
has been going strong for 16 years) is both a client of the other boxs
(since its drive is small and its slower) and the toolbox for when
things go wrong on other boxes: full man pages, HOWTOs, docs for
everything, serial terminal support, its own modem, exim4, mutt, X, text
and graphical browser, etc. So it has to be up-to-date should I need it
to access the internet directly and act as a firewall if I have to
reinstall one of the other boxes.
My Athlon is only 6 months old so hasn't earned the respect I have for
the IBM. So I'm experimenting with other OSs for the 486. NetBSD works
ok but uses Xfree86 V4 so I can only use the vesa driver for the s3; it
doesn't have the drive space to get into the packages/ports stuff.
Next, I'll try OpenBSD 4.0 since it has both v3 and v4. OBSD 4.1 just
came out and I don't know what its support is like.
Sorry for the rant. Thanks for listening.
Doug.
--
swap
Douglas Allan Tutty writes:
> I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
> racking up the memory.
X "racks up memory" because the browser is asking for it. Note this:
The page was created with Dreamworks. In other words, it's a buggy,
bloated piece of crap. Interesting (but not surprising) that Macromedia
claims copyright on pages created with software purchased from them.
--
John Hasler
--
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On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 09:54:58AM -0500, John Hasler wrote:
> Douglas Allan Tutty writes:
> > I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
> > racking up the memory.
>
> X "racks up memory" because the browser is asking for it. Note this:
>
>
>
>
>
> The page was created with Dreamworks. In other words, it's a buggy,
> bloated piece of crap. Interesting (but not surprising) that Macromedia
> claims copyright on pages created with software purchased from them.
Why wouldn't top show that Konq was using more memory instead of Xorg?
Doug.
--
swap
On Tuesday 08 May 2007 16:21, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:00:50PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> > On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> >
> > Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > > To generalize the problem, given that the software can't be changed, at
> > > what point do you start to look at either a bigger single computer or a
> > > cluster that looks like a bigger computer? For me its just an
> > > intelectual exercise; I went from a 486 with 32 MB swap to an Athlon
> > > with 1GB in a single bound. That Xorg makes _that_ swap really burns
> > > me up.
> >
> > Xorg swaps with a GB? I run Xfce with 512MB and I rarely see swapping;
> > even on my 196MB machine I didn't see much swapping. What else are you
> > running besides X?
>
> Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
> tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
>
> http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
>
> Then click on "Our Team".
>
> I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
> racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
> doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
> it thrashes, but...
> Doug.
Wow! That site doesn't half hammer the RAM. On my Gateway P111 500Mhz machine
with 250MB RAM, gkrellm normally shows about 190MB free (no swap used).
Going to the site started to hit the RAM. It was up and down like a yo-yo,
dropping as low as 11.1MB free, and with frequent freezing of gkrellm.
Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB. That
means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has to
something wrong with it, surely.
That was using FC2, KDE, and Konqueror.
Nigel.
--
swap
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Nigel Henry wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 May 2007 16:21, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[snip]
>> Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
>> tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
>>
>> http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
>>
>> Then click on "Our Team".
>>
>> I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
>> racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
>> doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
>> it thrashes, but...
>
>> Doug.
>
> Wow! That site doesn't half hammer the RAM. On my Gateway P111 500Mhz machine
> with 250MB RAM, gkrellm normally shows about 190MB free (no swap used).
>
> Going to the site started to hit the RAM. It was up and down like a yo-yo,
> dropping as low as 11.1MB free, and with frequent freezing of gkrellm.
>
> Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
> gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB. That
> means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has to
> something wrong with it, surely.
>
> That was using FC2, KDE, and Konqueror.
>
> Nigel.
Confirmed, That site does use 110MB of RAM. Why? Who knows? The page
is not that big. It's a perfect example of why I say that modern web
pages suck. all over the place formatting itself to it's
resolution instead of mine.
It seems to me, some webmasters should be shot. ;)
Joe
- --
Registerd Linux user #443289 at http://counter.li.org/
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swap
On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 06:56:51PM +0200, Joe Hart wrote:
> Nigel Henry wrote:
> > On Tuesday 08 May 2007 16:21, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> [snip]
> >> Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
> >> tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
> >>
> >> http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
> >>
> >> Then click on "Our Team".
> >>
> >> I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
> >> racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
> >> doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
> >> it thrashes, but...
> >
> >> Doug.
> >
> > Wow! That site doesn't half hammer the RAM. On my Gateway P111 500Mhz machine
> > with 250MB RAM, gkrellm normally shows about 190MB free (no swap used).
> >
> > Going to the site started to hit the RAM. It was up and down like a yo-yo,
> > dropping as low as 11.1MB free, and with frequent freezing of gkrellm.
> >
> > Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
> > gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB. That
> > means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has to
> > something wrong with it, surely.
> >
> > That was using FC2, KDE, and Konqueror.
> >
> > Nigel.
>
> Confirmed, That site does use 110MB of RAM. Why? Who knows? The page
> is not that big. It's a perfect example of why I say that modern web
> pages suck. all over the place formatting itself to it's
> resolution instead of mine.
>
> It seems to me, some webmasters should be shot. ;)
>
yep.
but works fine here in up-to-date sid/xfce/iceweasel. my ram usage
goes from 304MB, to 328MB on the front page. no change in "our team"
and frees it when I close the tab. Now 25MB is definitely huge for a
webpage, but its not causing anything like you guys are suggesting.
A
swap
On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 05:24:24PM +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
> On Tuesday 08 May 2007 16:21, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> > On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:00:50PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
> > > On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
> > Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
> > tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
> >
> > http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
> >
> > Then click on "Our Team".
> >
> > I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
> > racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
> > doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
> > it thrashes, but...
>
>
> Wow! That site doesn't half hammer the RAM. On my Gateway P111 500Mhz machine
> with 250MB RAM, gkrellm normally shows about 190MB free (no swap used).
>
> Going to the site started to hit the RAM. It was up and down like a yo-yo,
> dropping as low as 11.1MB free, and with frequent freezing of gkrellm.
>
> Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
> gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB. That
> means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has to
> something wrong with it, surely.
>
Short of getting into user quota, is there any way to keep an innocent
user (me) from inadvertantly crashing (ok, grinding to a thrashing halt)
the whole system just because I viewed a teaching-hospital's web site?
I see from another post that its fine in Sid. Perhaps when the lenny
dust settles, I should move the amd64 up to Lenny. I'm on dialup and the
amd64 is my main box (and server for other boxes) so don't want the
occasional breakage that running sid can entail.
When ready to do that (is it OK now?) do I just change my sources.list
from etch to lenny and use aptitude (interactive) like normal?
Thanks,
Doug.
Doug.
--
swap
Doug writes:
> Short of getting into user quota, is there any way to keep an innocent
> user (me) from inadvertantly crashing (ok, grinding to a thrashing halt)
> the whole system just because I viewed a teaching-hospital's web site?
help ulimit
--
John Hasler
--
swap
On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 07:58:29PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
>
> yep. man muttrc to the rescue. The "lists" directive includes both the
> list *and* your own address in the f-u-to header, whereas "subscribe"
> only includes the mailing list in the f-u header.
except with the "subscribe" directive, now mutt doesn't show the
"from" in the message tree, just the "to". So now the all say
"To:debian-user..." so its either turn off the "subscribe" or learn
how to restructure that tree. ... hmmm... time to learn more ;)
A
swap
On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 08:02:00PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 07:58:29PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> >
> > yep. man muttrc to the rescue. The "lists" directive includes both the
> > list *and* your own address in the f-u-to header, whereas "subscribe"
> > only includes the mailing list in the f-u header.
>
> except with the "subscribe" directive, now mutt doesn't show the
> "from" in the message tree, just the "to". So now the all say
> "To:debian-user..." so its either turn off the "subscribe" or learn
> how to restructure that tree. ... hmmm... time to learn more ;)
I don't have either in my muttrc and I don't have any problems ...
Regards,
Andrei
--
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.
(Albert Einstein)
swap
On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 09:39:00AM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 08:02:00PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> >
> > except with the "subscribe" directive, now mutt doesn't show the
> > "from" in the message tree, just the "to". So now the all say
> > "To:debian-user..." so its either turn off the "subscribe" or learn
> > how to restructure that tree. ... hmmm... time to learn more ;)
>
> I don't have either in my muttrc and I don't have any problems ...
>
Could it be that those are meant to force mutt to deal properly with
boken mailig list? That is, lists that don't include appropriate list
headers?
Regards,
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sánchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com
swap
On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 05:35:59AM -0400, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 09:39:00AM +0300, Andrei Popescu wrote:
> > On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 08:02:00PM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
> > >
> > > except with the "subscribe" directive, now mutt doesn't show the
> > > "from" in the message tree, just the "to". So now the all say
> > > "To:debian-user..." so its either turn off the "subscribe" or learn
> > > how to restructure that tree. ... hmmm... time to learn more ;)
> >
> > I don't have either in my muttrc and I don't have any problems ...
> >
> Could it be that those are meant to force mutt to deal properly with
> boken mailig list? That is, lists that don't include appropriate list
> headers?
probably. I'm sure you've all read the man page by now, but (paraphrasing)
subscribe includes a "follow-up-to" header with the lists address so
that anyone who replies to the message will send it to the list
instead of to you.
lists does the above but also includes your address so that you will
get a copy too. This is useful for posting to a list that you are not
subscribed to as you'll get the response.
and as regards the "To: debian-user..." in the index view:
the index_format key controls the look of the index.
it defaults to " ... %-15.15L ... " where 'L' means -- show who its
from, unless its to a list, then show the list. This must be useful if
you don't sort out your mail into different folders for lists. If you
do (like me) and want to actually see who the mail is from (if for
example, your trying to ignore the list ethicist for the day) then
change the index_format to " ... %-15.15F ... " so that it always
shows the "From" instead. I leave it to you to read the fine manual
for the rest of the string.
A
swap
On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 07:41:15AM -0700, Andrew Sackville-West wrote:
>
> probably. I'm sure you've all read the man page by now, but (paraphrasing)
>
> subscribe includes a "follow-up-to" header with the lists address so
> that anyone who replies to the message will send it to the list
> instead of to you.
>
> lists does the above but also includes your address so that you will
> get a copy too. This is useful for posting to a list that you are not
> subscribed to as you'll get the response.
>
> and as regards the "To: debian-user..." in the index view:
>
> the index_format key controls the look of the index.
>
> it defaults to " ... %-15.15L ... " where 'L' means -- show who its
> from, unless its to a list, then show the list. This must be useful if
> you don't sort out your mail into different folders for lists. If you
> do (like me) and want to actually see who the mail is from (if for
> example, your trying to ignore the list ethicist for the day) then
> change the index_format to " ... %-15.15F ... " so that it always
> shows the "From" instead. I leave it to you to read the fine manual
> for the rest of the string.
>
> A
Excellent. I got mine working how I want it now.
Regards,
-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sánchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com
swap
On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 02:46:01PM -0400, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
[bunch of stuff on bad websites]
>
> Short of getting into user quota, is there any way to keep an innocent
> user (me) from inadvertantly crashing (ok, grinding to a thrashing halt)
> the whole system just because I viewed a teaching-hospital's web site?
>
> I see from another post that its fine in Sid. Perhaps when the lenny
> dust settles, I should move the amd64 up to Lenny. I'm on dialup and the
> amd64 is my main box (and server for other boxes) so don't want the
> occasional breakage that running sid can entail.
note that "fine from sid" refers to a k7 architecture.
>
> When ready to do that (is it OK now?) do I just change my sources.list
> from etch to lenny and use aptitude (interactive) like normal?
yep. I'd wait a while still before moving up.
A
swap
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Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
> On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 05:24:24PM +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
>> On Tuesday 08 May 2007 16:21, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
>>> On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:00:50PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
>>>> On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
>>> Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
>>> tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
>>>
>>> http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
>>>
>>> Then click on "Our Team".
>>>
>>> I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
>>> racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
>>> doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
>>> it thrashes, but...
>>
>> Wow! That site doesn't half hammer the RAM. On my Gateway P111 500Mhz machine
>> with 250MB RAM, gkrellm normally shows about 190MB free (no swap used).
>>
>> Going to the site started to hit the RAM. It was up and down like a yo-yo,
>> dropping as low as 11.1MB free, and with frequent freezing of gkrellm.
>>
>> Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
>> gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB. That
>> means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has to
>> something wrong with it, surely.
>>
>
I was curious so I clicked the link, nothing unusual no ram-sucking
on my machine. I am running Sid.
Cheers
Frank
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Frank McCormick wrote:
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Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
On Tue, May 08, 2007 at 05:24:24PM +0200, Nigel Henry wrote:
On Tuesday 08 May 2007 16:21, Douglas Allan Tutty wrote:
On Mon, May 07, 2007 at 11:00:50PM -0400, Celejar wrote:
On Mon, 7 May 2007 12:15:31 -0400
Sometimes, just links2, sometimes konq. I ususally use Xfce but have
tried it with just rxvt, pdmenu, then links2 or konq. Try this site:
http://www.uhn.ca/Clinics_&_Services/services/asthma
Then click on "Our Team".
I don't know what's with this site but all of a sudden Xorg starts
racking up the memory. When I leave the site, the memory footprint
doesn't shrink. Eventually, I just exit X and startx again. Not that
it thrashes, but...
Wow! That site doesn't half hammer the RAM. On my Gateway P111 500Mhz machine
with 250MB RAM, gkrellm normally shows about 190MB free (no swap used).
Going to the site started to hit the RAM. It was up and down like a yo-yo,
dropping as low as 11.1MB free, and with frequent freezing of gkrellm.
Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB. That
means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has to
something wrong with it, surely.
I was curious so I clicked the link, nothing unusual no ram-sucking
on my machine. I am running Sid.
Cheers
Frank
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FWIW, I can concur with Frank here. I checked with both Konqueror and
IceWeasel and there was nothing unusual. I agree there was a quick tug
on CPU resources, but that passed rapidly. Otherwise, no anomalies.
@
--
"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers." - Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
swap
On Wed, May 09, 2007 at 01:46:35AM +0100, andy wrote:
>>>
> >>>Clicked on "our team", and the RAM got hammered again. Big freezeup of
> >>>gkrellm, then the page was loaded, and free RAM levelled out at 84MB.
> >>>That means that 110MB of RAM is being used to view the site. There has
> >>>to something wrong with it, surely.
> >>>
> >>>
> >
> > I was curious so I clicked the link, nothing unusual no ram-sucking
> >on my machine. I am running Sid.
> >
> FWIW, I can concur with Frank here. I checked with both Konqueror and
> IceWeasel and there was nothing unusual. I agree there was a quick tug
> on CPU resources, but that passed rapidly. Otherwise, no anomalies.
It does seem like the problem, whatever it is, is solved in Sid. So
I'll wait for a while.
I tried setting ulimit -v to 98304 and it did keep Xorg from thrashing
the system, it would just kill off the remote Konq and the terminal
window running top. However, I've go a new problem: My panel in Xfce
doesn't show up. I tried moving my configs out of the way and I've
tried purging and reinstalling xfce-panel with no luck. All that
thrashing and hard reboots may have damaged something. I don't have
samhain to tell me if anything has changed or gone missing. If I can't
solve it, I'll keep my eye on the rest of the system and if other things
go haywire I'll consider just reinstalling.
Thanks for all your help.
Doug.
--