pi hung???

[ric96]

I was compiling retropie on my pi and it being bery cpu intensive, my pi is showing both power and act/sdcard light constantly lit instead of flickering as usual.
Is it hung??

[kusti8]

What does top show when you/if you can ssh into it?

[ric96]

What does top show when you/if you can ssh into it?

Although its working now looks like it was super loaded
I couldn't ssh at that time at all even tty2 via alt+f2 hung

[jamesh]

Sounds like it started swapping out to SD card. That can bring them to a crawl.

[ric96]

Sounds like it started swapping out to SD card. That can bring them to a crawl.

It started doing it again, any way to disable sd swap??

[Jednorozec]

You could move your root file system to a hard drive.

[ric96]

You could move your root file system to a hard drive.

Wouldn't be worth the hassel and then i would need an external power supply hub

[ric96]

Sounds like it started swapping out to SD card. That can bring them to a crawl.

Ok so it is NOT swap as i disabled it positively.....

Swap disabled using:

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get purge dphys-swapfile
sudo reboot

Environment to replicate tge issues: compile emulationstation using the retopi script using

Code: Select all

sudi MAKEFLAGS="-j4" ./retropie_setup.sh

Select individual install
Select emulationstation
Select Source based

Has to do something with the ram and/or -j4 as cpu stress test went fine with the system responded fine while the stresstest ran
Stress Test:
github.com/ric96/hotpi

[Update]
Tried using -j2 and as expected the program compiled smoothly with the Free RAM dipping to a minimum 155mb and mostly staying above 200mb.
Whereas with -j4 Frer RAM went as low as 15-30mb.

[plugwash]

Even without swap a low ram situation can cause extreme performance drops before it finally triggers the OOM killler. Without swap the kernel can't evict "anonymous" pages but it can and will still evict pages backed by files such as the code of the programs and libraries you are running.

[Aydan]

What I did in a case like this is putting the swap file on a usb hdd, a fast usb stick might do the trick too. Can even be done in runtime.
Just make sure that the swap priority of the HDD hosted swapfile is higher than the one on the SD card.
No need to move the whole root fs.

Regards
Aydan