Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id ; Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:39:08 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id ; Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:39:08 -0500 Received: from barry.mail.mindspring.net ([207.69.200.25]:54823 "EHLO barry.mail.mindspring.net") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id ; Tue, 7 Jan 2003 21:39:07 -0500 Message-ID: <3E1B917C.2090709@emageon.com> Date: Tue, 07 Jan 2003 20:48:28 -0600 From: Brian Tinsley Organization: Emageon User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Brian Gerst CC: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: long stalls References: <3E1B73F3.2070604@emageon.com> <3E1B907F.60008@didntduck.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 1808 Lines: 51 Thanks for the reply! I thought highmem I/O was addressed in 2.4.20? Am I off-base here? I actually just built a 2.4.20 kernel with highmem debugging turned on. We'll see if anything pops up. Brian Gerst wrote: > 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. >> >> >> > With 4GB of memory you are likely boucing I/O requests to low memory. > This has been fixed in 2.5. I do not know if a backport exists for 2.4. > > -- > Brian Gerst -- -[========================]- -[ Brian Tinsley ]- -[ Chief Systems Engineer ]- -[ Emageon ]- -[========================]- - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/