Thrashing

[Dennis J. Eberl]

John,

JJ Neff wrote:

> The "thrashing did occur while I was responding to e-mail in Yahoo mail.  So
> many pages were open in Netscape.

I haven't had thrashing under this circumstance, but I have had Netscape freeze
up. It didn't stop me from retreating to my Shisen-Sho game on another desktop
and when I returned, Netscape "magically" (yeah, sure) started working again.

I am running an SMP kernel with two Pentium Pro processors and only 64
MB of RAM. How much memory on your machine? Thrashing occurs when
memory is so tight the little sucker starts paging its brains out (using swap,
a.k.a., virtual memory) to creep along trying to do the job. It's a pain in the
ASCII but only becomes a problem if it ends up deadlocked (think of a snake
swallowing it's tail), meaning it can never complete an operation.

DOES ANYONE HAVE A REALLY COMPETENT EXPLANATION?

> It came on slow and then when I tried to
> click away , vroooommmm the hard drive was off to the races.  As you stated
> nothing seemed to break it.  I couldn't move mouse, no key combos worked, and I
> couldn't Ctrl-Alt-F1.
>
> What just hit me though was I have other machines on Lan, I should have been
> able to go to my NT server and telnet to my DEBIAN box.

I never thought of that. I usually have (or could easily get) another machine
running on my LAN. I'll have to re-enable Telnet.

Dennis

> Then command a
> shutdown or kill the Netscape service.  That never occured to me while I was in
> front of the machine.  I know this doesn't help those with one box, sorry. I
> may have to try to upgrade my Netscape also as James suggested.
>
> JJN
> --- "Dennis J. Eberl" <dje at pcom.net> wrote:
> >
> > <---------------  snip  --------------->