Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:51:53 -0500
From: Russell Leighton <russ@elegant-software.com>
Subject: Re: long stalls
To: Brian Tinsley <btinsley@emageon.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
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I can't help, but I can echo a "me too".

We only see it when I have 2 file I/O intensive processes...they both 
will just stop for some few seconds, system seems idle...then
they just start again. RH7.3 SMP, Dual PIII, 4GB RAM, 3com RAID Controller .

Brian Tinsley wrote:

> 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.
>
>
>


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