From: Kalle Olavi Niemitalo <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: 29 Jul 2000 20:31:24 +0300
Marcus Brinkmann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> compiling oskit really stresses the Hurd. It takes many hours
> on my machine. But when I checked after 8 hours, it seemed to
> make slow progress, so I interrupted it and looked at the state
> of the machine.
When I compiled more stuff on the Hurd in Oct 1999, I used to get
this behavior too. The programs didn't even have to be big;
perhaps that's because the machine only has 16 MB of RAM. When I
compiled libc, I had to interrupt and reboot the system several
times to get it back to speed.
Me too :-(.
> I found out that the ext2fs.static process on /mnt, where the compilation
> happened, had 137 threads and 1062 ports. But the root filesystem had
> 1817 threads and 7808 ports.
In my case, ext2fs.static had 847 ports and PID 3 (the pager)
had 6779. Perhaps you too have many more ports in the pager?
I bet. When memory is getting low, Mach starts paging out stuff.
Apparently it does so at a rate which causes every request to start a
new thread (i.e. the previous pageouts have not yet completed when a
new one arrives). Some time ago Thomas made some changes to the
paging code in the kernel with the idea to avoid this scenario, but
apparently it doesn't help enough in your case.
Mark
