swapfile thrashing in tiger after updates

I've seem to noticed after the last update was pushed or the last itunes update (i don't remember which) that my swapfile is getting thrashed majorly hard. I ran "top" and nothing looked out of the ordinary. the trashing got so bad, I was waiting for my hd to finish its vm swap while my window animations froze midway. the only way to solve my problem right now is to delete the /var/vm/swapfile* and reboot file which isn't a very good solution. the weird thing is sometime to get past the slash screen on boot sometimes I have to reset my PRAM.

My other guess is my hard disk maybe is going bad, which means it a bitch to replace the hd.

I have powerbook 12" dvi with 768 mb ram and 13.7/37.7 GB HD

anybody got any ideas?

baseline vm_stats:

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 125381.
Pages active: 22274.
Pages inactive: 32151.
Pages wired down: 16802.
"Translation faults": 288009.
Pages copy-on-write: 15193.
Pages zero filled: 135875.
Pages reactivated: 0.
Pageins: 14072.
Pageouts: 0.
Object cache: 2791 hits of 6564 lookups (42% hit rate)

if it happens again, I'll post when it does start thrashing again.

Bear said:

You're not paging. Not with those stats. The swapfile is not getting used at all. You should just have one swapfile in /var/vm.

I average around 5 swapfiles on a 2GB PM G4. That's a lot of swapfile usage.

If your system starts acting up again capture the same data and also an "Ls -l /var/vm" for reference.

It might be 10.4.2 or the last security update. I've noticed a bit of oddness as well. I'm hoping 10.4.3 fixes it.

Click to expand...

that was my baseline of 0

Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 18118.
Pages active: 100376.
Pages inactive: 54413.
Pages wired down: 23698.
"Translation faults": 3338970.
Pages copy-on-write: 117541.
Pages zero filled: 1952930.
Pages reactivated: 81688.
Pageins: 35815.
Pageouts: 1772.


I keep getting "stuck" processes. apparently the lag is caused by the processes waiting on other processes to come out of deadlock. I believe they are waiting on the hard drive I/O.

FYI: dnetc is something like a folding program. it suppose to suck all the cpu speed and never giving me a problem. although there was just an update. I'll trying running without it for awhile. i still think i have a hard drive problem.

Processes: 68 total, 3 running, 2 stuck, 63 sleeping... 232 threads 00:05:54
Load Avg: 1.57, 1.59, 1.66 CPU usage: 82.3% user, 17.7% sys, 0.0% idle
SharedLibs: num = 188, resident = 37.1M code, 4.03M data, 6.12M LinkEdit
MemRegions: num = 9232, resident = 186M + 15.8M private, 125M shared
PhysMem: 91.3M wired, 342M active, 220M inactive, 654M used, 113M free
VM: 6.33G + 126M 35969(0) pageins, 1772(0) pageouts

PID COMMAND %CPU TIME #TH #PRTS #MREGS RPRVT RSHRD RSIZE VSIZE
376 top 15.0% 0:23.08 1 18 22 720K 400K 1.15M 26.9M
375 mdimport 0.0% 0:00.65 4 64 56 1.10M 2.17M 3.17M 39.5M
373 Safari 0.5% 0:10.68 6 129 310 23.4M- 27.3M 35.4M- 185M-
367 bash 0.0% 0:00.03 1 14 17 208K 764K 876K 27.1M
366 login 0.0% 0:00.02 1 16 36 144K 416K 576K 26.9M
348 Mail 0.0% 0:03.99 7 142 271 6.23M 14.6M 15.9M 167M
289 Alerts Dae 0.0% 0:02.68 3 185 149 2.26M 6.93M 5.84M 154M
251 Skype 4.0% 1:58.57 13 262 408 24.1M 16.5M 33.6M 250M
243 iChatAgent 0.0% 0:01.52 5 84 131 2.25M 3.94M 5.45M 107M
242 iChat 0.0% 0:23.39 9 252 379 6.64M 17.4M 16.9M 187M
235 Microsoft 0.0% 0:23.11 2 83 144 6.74M 6.15M 9.85M 138M
234 Microsoft 0.9% 2:50.33 6 185 347 21.2M 27.2M 17.8M 212M
224 DashboardC 0.0% 0:13.59 3 79 152 4.20M 4.13M 6.77M 140M
223 DashboardC 0.0% 0:13.19 3 95 138 3.67M 4.13M 6.35M 139M
222 DashboardC 0.0% 0:13.96 3 79 149 4.25M 4.13M 6.77M 140M
221 DashboardC 0.0% 0:00.89 3 79 122 2.75M 6.36M 5.75M 147M
219 DashboardC 0.0% 0:00.63 3 95 111 2.89M 3.97M 5.40M 138M
218 DashboardC 0.0% 0:08.49 4 108 170 7.02M 5.56M 11.4M 151M
217 DashboardC 0.0% 0:01.17 3 79 128 3.26M 12.2M 6.18M 139M
216 DashboardC 0.0% 0:09.24 4 104 139 7.04M 4.11M 9.64M 141M
215 DashboardC 0.0% 0:01.31 3 100 183 4.80M 8.23M 9.01M 156M
214 DashboardC 4.5% 0:20.24 4 108 161 5.96M 6.38M 10.4M 151M
208 bash 0.0% 0:00.04 1 14 16 212K 764K 852K 27.1M
207 login 0.0% 0:00.02 1 16 36 132K 416K 564K 26.9M
205 AppleSpell 0.0% 0:00.60 1 33 34 696K 1.68M 2.11M 37.7M
198 dnetc 65.0% 3:54:25 2 18 23 228K 604K 828K 27.6M

yeah i was right it was the hard drive. i get the flashing system icon now when i try to turn on my powerbook. i have to order combo drive and hard drive. my combo drive stop working months ago.