swap_pager

[pobox at verysmall.org]

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 04:16:41PM +0100, pobox at verysmall.org wrote:
>> I am running FreeBSD 5.4 in VMware using USB 1.1 external HDD as a disk, 
>> which means quite slow I/O. It works fine for my needs, I only get
>>
>> swap_pager: indefinite wait buffer: device: da0s1f, blkno: xxx, size: xxx
>>
>> when performing heavy operations, such as rsync of a 1 GB database dump 
>> file.
>>
>> All references to the problem I found point out hardware failure. Could, 
>> however, the problem be simply that the I/O does not manage to let the 
>> request go through within the 20 seconds wait time and that the hardware 
>> is OK (apart from the fact that I/O is slow? And - is this message just 
>> a notice, or does it mean that I get data corruption?
> 
> Yes, it just means "operation did not complete within the arbitrarily
> chosen time period", and by itself it doesn't mean there exists any
> further problem.  If the operation didn't complete because the drive
> threw it away, has bad blocks, etc, that would be a problem.  In your
> case it's likely to just be the slow disk.
> 
> Kris

Kris,

thanks for the clarification!

Best,
Iv