kswapd and krefilld behaving badly

[TJ Toedebusch]

I have a server running RedHat 2.1 where the kswapd and krefilld processes suck up CPU for several minutes, then go away, then come back...

The server has 16 GB ram and is not taxed at all:

[root@ root]# free -m
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 15788 8315 7473 4 40 6146
-/+ buffers/cache: 2127 13660
Swap: 2047 0 2047

As you can see there is plenty of free memory left.

Are there any vm.xxxxxx parameters that can be tweaked to prevent this from happening?

Thanks

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

uname -a

We need to know your kernel.

If you are not using a hugemem kernel, the amount of memory your system can use is severely limited even if free is reporting lots of unused memory.

Also many versions of RH 2.1 and 3.0 had kswapd problems. Upgrading the kernel to the most current for the release was helpful with this.

SEP

[TJ Toedebusch]

Yeah, we are using the enterprise kernel and it's a newer kernel:

[]# uname -a
Linux XXXXXXX 2.4.9-e.68enterprise #1 SMP Thu Jan 19 18:33:29 EST 2006 i686 unknown

I have been reading some stuff on the Virtual Memory and tweaking, but I don't want to start changing parameters w/o knowing what they will do...