What can cause peaks in pagetables in /proc/meminfo ?

Posted by Fuzzy76 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Fuzzy76
Published on 2010-04-22T11:58:16Z Indexed on 2010/04/22 12:04 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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gameserver

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page-tables

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interrupts

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pagetables

I have a gameserver running Debian Lenny on a VPS host. Even when experiencing a fairly low load, the players start experiencing major lag (ping times rise from 50 ms to 150-500 ms) in bursts of 3 - 10 seconds.

I have installed Munin server monitoring, but when looking at the graphs it looks like the server has plenty of CPU, RAM and bandwidth available. The only weird thing I noticed is some peaks in the memory graph attributed to "page_tables" which maps to PageTables in /proc/meminfo but I can't find any good information on what this might mean.

alt text

Any ideas what might be causing this? If you need any more graps, just let me know.

The interrupts/second count is at roughly 400-600 during this period (nearly all from eth0). The drop in committed was caused by me trying to lower the allocated memory for the server from 512MB to 256MB, but that didn't seem to help.

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