>> > The reason I'm curious is that we are once again having
>> > problems with occasional 15-20 second "lockups" of the
>> > machines when they start swapping. [...]

>> Me too.  The same happens on i386 and Sparc.  Pretty annoying. :-(

>You guys may want to go back and read Sean Doran's message sent
>to port-sparc on August 10 under the subject "System slowdown
>during paging", where he suggests tweaking the MAXSLP define in
>/sys/arch/xxx/include/vmparam.h.

Actually, it looks more to me like it isn't paging aggresively enough
to begin with.  So, when a heavy demand for memory comes all of a
sudden, it has to work too hard to try and free up enough memory.
What is notable is that it usually takes several of these multi-second
pauses for it to free up enough memory for everything to run again, in
many cases.

This is just how it "feels" to me.  I don't personally know anything
about the vm code.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
  Michael L. VanLoon                           michaelv@MindBender.serv.net
        --<  Free your mind and your machine -- NetBSD free un*x  >--
    NetBSD working ports: 386+PC, Mac 68k, Amiga, Atari 68k, HP300, Sun3,
        Sun4/4c/4m, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, PC532, VAX, MVME68k, arm32...
    NetBSD ports in progress: PICA, others...
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