Ubuntu
linux package

  1. Natty (11.04)
  2. Bug #755066
  3. Comment #14

Comment 14 for bug 755066

Revision history for this message
Anton¡o Sch¡fano (skiantoz) wrote :

Hello,

I am experiencing a very similar problem with my laptop (AMD fusion based, HP Pavilion dm1-3101 - 4GB RAM, CPU AMD E350 dual core), a fresh Natty installation with updates and kernel 2.6.38-9-generic amd64.
When trying to rsync a few GB directories from my main PC to the laptop, after a while (random) the laptop hangs. Nothing is displayed on screen and I cannot find any trace in the logs.

After some hours (sic!) spent on this problem, I have noticed that:
- The system hangs when free memory gets low (monitored with 'top' on a terminal).
- As free memory decreases, kswapd0 starts consuming more and more cpu time, till it reaches 60%-80%. Swap is not used however, and I was able to reproduce the hang even with swap off.
- As a workaround, I eventually found that dropping the disk caches when kswapd0 starts misbehaving (echo 1 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches) prevents the kernel from freezing and, thanks to that, I could finally complete the rsync.

Do you think this is the same problem, or should I open a new bug?