Comment 3 for bug 1764180

Hi Theodore,

Thanks for your reply.

As far as I know the system is not swapping, at least not a lot, but as
indicated, very hard to figure out what is going on without being able
to use a terminal screen. I also set the swap space to another disk than
the disk that seems to be causing the issue.

And yes, I know it has (probably) nothing to do with e2fsprogs, but I
had to choose something when reporting the error (using command line
utility).

And to me no matter what it is, it is still kind of a bug. I think an OS
virtually freezing like this is not a stable OS.

I am trying to change the disk scheduler now to see if that changes
anything.

Please note I started using ionice and nice for the suspect processes.
That doesn't seem to make any difference.

Looking forward to more info about how I can figure out what is going on,

Kind regards,

Guus

On Monday, 16 April, 2018 10:58 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Your system sounds like its thrashing due your processes wanting to you
> more memory than is available in your system. (BTW, this has nothing to
> do with e2fsprogs).
>
> Some links to pages that might be helpful:
>
> http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2015/04/10/understanding-page-faults-and-memory-swap-in-outs-when-should-you-worry
> https://serverfault.com/questions/77461/how-do-i-measure-disk-thrashing-on-linux
> https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/259223/memory-usage-inexorably-creeping-upward
>