[PLUG] strange system behavior - inotify problem?

American Citizen website.reader3 at gmail.com
Sat Dec 2 18:52:40 UTC 2023


Hello:

I have a very interesting problem occurring my opensuse Leap 15.5 linux 
system.

I am crunching number theory modules, using magma to do descents on 
elliptic curves. I do open a new konsole screen and do a tail on the 
magma results, in real time. There are 6 magma programs executing in 
this way at the same time.

I also have 3 monitoring programs, but they are set up as a bash script 
file with a while [ 1 ] loop, but each has a sleep nnn seconds at the 
end of the loop.

I was getting occasionally the tail warning message, no files left for 
tail, using polling instead.

I installed the inotify-comment bash script from the stackexchange web 
page 
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/15509/whos-consuming-my-inotify-resources. 
Running this script does not show anything unusual, I am only using 402 
watches in 131 instances. I did up the values in the sysctl.conf file to 
large sizes, so I don't suspect that the problem is caused by this.

The system strangely halts the start of a new process, for up to 20 secs 
at a time, for example, I tried to open up a new Konsole screen and the 
window opens up, but then sits there for a period of time before 
completing the interior of the screen.

Another example, while typing this email, I made a mistake and had to 
back up, the moment I hit the backspace key, everything froze for about 
10 secs or so, before resuming.

Third example, one of my monitoring screens suddenly went into 
uninterruptable mode, trying using control-C did not work, I had to 
terminate the Konsole screen and restart the bash script over again in a 
new window.

Right now I don't know quite what to do? This is slowing things way down 
for me, while the system seems fine, I am only using 4 gigs of the 32 
gigs system RAM, so that should not be a problem.

Puzzled -

Randall



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