Swap causes 100% IOWait and renders system useless
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Mozilla Firefox |
Invalid
|
Critical
|
|||
firefox-3.0 (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
firefox-3.5 (Ubuntu) |
Invalid
|
High
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
Every once in a while my system becomes completely absorbed by IOWait, which I believe is when swapping occurs. I have 2GB RAM and it rarely uses more than 1GB of RAM. I have tried changing vm.swappiness to 0 without any success as well.
I would love to provide a `pidstat -d` output or similar, but seriously the system becomes completely unresponsive for long periods of time. It displays mouse animations and continues to play musing in Pandora or Rhythmbox (although it may stutter) and when I regain control of the system there are no processes with unreasonable statistics. I don't believe it's related to update-
Anoyne care to actually find out what is causing this? IOWait related issues are a huge problem and nobody seems to care. Any debugging tips would be much appreciated, but remember that I cannot execute anything when this is happeneing.
I suspect that the kernel page flushing (kpdflush?) may be the cause. Anyone think it would help to put swap as a file on the partition for better IO scheduling?
Thanks!
affects: | ubuntu → firefox (Ubuntu) |
Changed in firefox: | |
status: | Unknown → New |
Changed in firefox: | |
importance: | Unknown → Critical |
Changed in firefox: | |
status: | New → Invalid |
Changed in firefox-3.5 (Ubuntu): | |
status: | Triaged → Incomplete |
When this happened I ran `pidstat -d` and was able to `killall -9 firefox` and it solved the problem! See the attached output if you're interested.