why the swapping

[Tim Middleton]

Thanks for the tips, all who responded (including a few who responded via 
email-only --- Kris, thanks for not just calling me an idiot outright. <-; 
BTW, thanks for your BSDCan presentation ... really motivated me to try to 
get the 5.x boxes I have in production upgraded! I'll say no more...).

This was a false alarm. The box in question is being monitored fairly closely 
with some home-brew rrdtool graphs, and there was a definite corelation 
between the load and the paging graphs. The problem was confusion regarding 
the *scale* of the graph. The rrdtool graphs add an "m" to indicate the 
numbers are in the "millis", when the frequency scale is less than 1 (per 
second), rather than using decimal places. This was not noticed. So the 
massive swapping was actually miniscule. Sorry about that. (-: 

The real slow down is probably simply due to just too many heavy parallel 
database queries. 

-- 
Tim Middleton | Vex.Net    | There is a wisdom that is woe; but there 
x at veX.net     | VexTech.ca | is a woe that is madness. --Melville (MD)