[oclug] kswapd problems?

[Milan Budimirovic]

I have encountered a strange problem with the kernel swap daemon. I have
a twin PIII-866 server with 3G of RAM. Because I do a lot of keyword
indexing, I added two swap partitions which totalled a little less than
1G (I didn't want to butt up against the 4G barrier). I found that as my
indexer soaked up more and more RAM, the server crawled to a
near-standstill. So, I decided, "Hmm, I think I'll just tell the indexer
to use less RAM and remove the swap partitions. I don't reaaly need the
extra Gig." BAAAAAD idea. kswapd began to eat clock cycles like there
was no tomorrow. It was using 99% of the CPU when it wasn't supposed to
be running at all. What would cause that?

I am using a 2.4.9 kernel with SMP support. I seem to recall that there
were some VM issues with the 2.4.x kernels. Is this something that a
newer kernel is likely to fix? I've built a 2.4.18 kernel but haven't
installed it yet.