squeak using high CPU, reporting little use

David T. Lewis lewis at mail.msen.com
Mon Jul 4 17:39:54 UTC 2005


Are you swapping? The VM will keep allocating virtual memory space
as needed, eventually getting to the point where your OS will start
swapping to disk. This might lead to the symptoms you describe.

If you have something like xosview on your system, you will easily
see the swap and paging activity if that's what is happening.

Dave

On Mon, Jul 04, 2005 at 09:42:55AM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 03, 2005 at 11:19:37AM -0700, Ross Boylan wrote:
> > squeak gets in this odd state where it consumes lots of cpu according
> > to the operating system tools, but when I do a debug message tally it
> > reports over 90% of the time in idle.
> Let me try to say that more clearly.
> 
> Tools running outside of squeak report it is using up most of the CPU
> on the computer. (basically a top-equivalent).
> 
> If I use the debugger inside of squeak, it reports that squeak is
> mostly idle.
> 
> > 
> > Doing a save always clears up the problem (perhaps because of a global
> > garbage collect?).
> 
> I think I can confirm that.  I got in this state again, and did
> Smalltalk garbageCollect
> That fixed the problem, and answered with the suspiciously large
> 1029077260 (about 1G, if I'm counting right).
> 
> > 
> > 
> > Smalltalk vmVersion gives
> > 'Squeak3.8gamma of ''24 November 2004'' [latest update: #6548]'
> > 
> > Running on linux with a largish image (57Mg).
> > 
> > The image itself is a bit old, with #4956 the last update; I think
> > that makes it 3.6 era.
> > 
> > Any ideas what's going on?



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