Message-ID: <3E1B73F3.2070604@emageon.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 18:42:27 -0600
From: Brian Tinsley <btinsley@emageon.com>
Organization: Emageon
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To: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: long stalls
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We have been having terrible problems with long stalls, meaning from a 
couple of minutes to an hour, happening when filesystem I/O load gets 
high. The system time as reported by vmstat or sar will increase up to 
99% and as it spreads to each procesor, the system becomes completely 
unresponsive (except that it responds to pings just fine - 
interesting!). When the system finally returns to the world of the 
living, the only evidence that something bad has happened is the runtime 
for kswapd is abnormally high. I have seen this happen with the stock 
2.4.17, 2.4.19, and 2.4.20 kernels on SMP PIII and PIV machines (either 
4GB or 8GB RAM, all SCSI disks, dual GigE NICs). I've searched the lkml 
archives and google and have found several similar postings, but there 
is never an explanation or resolution. Any help would be *very* much 
appreciated! If any info from the system in question is desired, I will 
be glad to provide it.


-- 

-[========================]-
-[      Brian Tinsley     ]-
-[ Chief Systems Engineer ]-
-[        Emageon         ]-
-[========================]-


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