Re: Pauses in 2.5.44 (some kind of memory policy change?)

[Andrew Morton]

"Adam J. Richter" wrote:
> 
>         I run /usr/bin/mail to read my mail box file, which has about
> 24 megabytes (in 2300 messages, mostly spam).  After this, about half
> of the time, my keyboard and mouse will intermittently stop responding
> for a second or two, maybe one or two times, and then everything
> seems to be OK.  This happens *after* the mail spool has been read.
> This did not happen in previous kernels (well, maybe 2.5.43, I can't
> quite be sure about that one).
> 
>         The mail spool is on NFS, but I suspect the culprit might be
> some kind of memory balancing change in 2.5.44.
> 

Clean pagecache usually doesn't cause much trouble...

Please send a `vmstat 1' trace which covers the episode.