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[Launchpad Bug Tracker <386554@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60
days.]

** Changed in: linux (Ubuntu)
       Status: Incomplete => Expired

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/386554

Title:
  System behaved as if OOM when it had plenty to spare

Status in “linux” package in Ubuntu:
  Expired

Bug description:
  Had the weirdest behaviour today, current karmic kernel.  I haven't
  got a swap partition or swap file configured, because I was playing
  with swapd and stuff earlier and hadn't turned them back on again.

  The system suddenly became extremely slow and unresponsive, with
  massive amounts of disk activity

  The thing is, here was the output of free at the time:

               total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
  Mem:       1534944    1490160      44784          0      18396    1078164
  -/+ buffers/cache:     393600    1141344
  Swap:      0     0    0

  In other words, while it had actually 44MB free (which is still quite
  a lot, even though I was doing things in Firefox) - there was 1GB of
  cached pages sitting there - and I was doing much so most of them
  can't have been dirty!

  So why was the machine even touching the disk?  It should have been
  able to simply purge non-dirty pages from its cache and carry on

  Or am I grossly missing something?

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