[Techtalk] Mystery cache

[David Sumbler]

"Val Henson" <val.henson at gmail.com> writes:

> On 4/9/06, David Sumbler <david at aeolia.co.uk> wrote:
>> I have been trying to run Linux on a Psion 7 computer.  This is a kind
>> of large hand-held with 16Mb RAM, and no hard drive, so it is using a
>> CF card as main storage, and another (64Mb) CF card as swap.
>> Obviously the swap is very slow.
>>
>> Trying to run apt-get I discovered that "Building Dependency Tree"
>> takes well over 3 hours!  Having asked on an e-mail group if other
>> people have this problem, one person running Linux on a Psion 5mx -
>> basically a similar machine, also with 16Mb RAM - said that it takes
>> less than a minute.

... 

> Several things could be going on here.  One way to narrow down the
> possibilities is to try booting with swap disabled - edit /etc/fstab -
> and see if it's still really slow.  It looks like you might have just
> barely enough memory to do this, especially if you only run one getty
> and one shell.

I have now tried this.  "Building Dependency Tree", without swap, took
less than half the time it has been taking with swap enabled.  But
once that was finished, I got:

__alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed (gfp=0x1d2/0) 
VM: killing process apt-get
Killed

I assume that that means that it ran out of memory.

David

-- 

david at aeolia.co.uk