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
Read the original article Hit count: 264

Filed under:

linux

|

gameserver

|

page-tables

|

interrupts

|

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.

© Server Fault or respective owner

Related posts about linux

apt-get install and update fail

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I've got a problem with apt-get update and apt-get install ... commands . every time update or installing fails and errors are : Get:1 http://dl.google.com stable Release.gpg [198B] Ign http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb/ stable/main Translation-en_US Get:2 http://dl… >>> More
kernel module compiling error

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
sh@ubuntu:/home/ccpp/helloworld$ make gcc-4.6 -O2 -DMODULE -D_KERNEL_ -W -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -isystem /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build/include -c -o hello-1.o hello-1.c hello-1.c:4:0: warning: "MODULE" redefined [enabled by default] <command-line>:0:0: note: this is… >>> More
Build-Essentials installation failing

as seen on Ask Ubuntu - Search for 'Ask Ubuntu'
I am having trouble accessing the several critical header files that show to be a part of the build process. The "Ubuntu Software Center" shows "Build Essentials" as installed: Next I did the following two commands, which did not improve the problem: ~$ sudo apt-get install build-essential [sudo]… >>> More
Updating Debian kernel

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I'm trying to update my Debian machine to 2.6.32-46 (which is the new stable). However, after doing apt-get update my apt-cache search linux-image shows me: linux-headers-2.6.32-5-486 - Header files for Linux 2.6.32-5-486 linux-headers-2.6.32-5-686-bigmem - Header files for Linux 2.6.32-5-686-bigmem linux-headers-2… >>> More
Serial connection over a single USB cable (Windows to linux, or linux to linux)

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I'm helping out with a project for an embedded device that only has USB and no serial. This device is running Linux. These days, when we need to connect to a serial port on a device we typically use a USB to serial adapter (on something like a phone system or a load balancing device, etc). I would… >>> More

Related posts about gameserver

Route gameserver traffic through cloudflare?

as seen on Super User - Search for 'Super User'
I use cloudflare for my website and we have a gameserver I was wondering if it is possible to route traffic through cloudflare. This recently sprung into my head when I realized that I could route Shoutcast through another of cloudflares port (8080) which does not do any performance enhancing or… >>> More
Dos/ Flood Lag even though Port not Saturated

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
My GameServers had been under some UDP Floods due to which they generated outputs to the attacker which gave the GameServers some huge lags. Thanks to friends at ServerFault that upon different kind of testing, I was able to successfully block the attack. My question is actually something else but… >>> More
Huge or minimal performance hit running game servers on a Virtual Machine? [closed]

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
I have a two dedicated servers to choose from depending on which one would do a better job. I plan on updating the Hard Drive space and RAM at a later date depending on how I move forward. Server 1: 500GB Hard Drive 8GB RAM 2x 64bit Intel Xeon L5420(Quad Core) @ 2.50Ghz Server2: 500GB Hard… >>> More
Advantage of using a smartfox server

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
Hi, we are trying to outsource the server side of our game applicaton to someone. They recommend using http://www.smartfoxserver.com/ instead of our traditional php/mysql combination. Our game is in actionscript and will be using social aspects of facebook later on. Smartfoxserver is supposed to… >>> More
What can cause peaks in pagetables in /proc/meminfo ?

as seen on Server Fault - Search for 'Server Fault'
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… >>> More