Subject: Re: High load average on disk I/O on 2.6.17-rc3
From: Arjan van de Ven <arjan@infradead.org>
To: Erik Mouw <erik@harddisk-recovery.com>
Cc: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>, Jason Schoonover <jasons@pioneer-pra.com>,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
In-Reply-To: <20060508111345.GA1875@harddisk-recovery.com>
References: <200605051010.19725.jasons@pioneer-pra.com>
	 <20060507095039.089ad37c.akpm@osdl.org>
	 <20060508111345.GA1875@harddisk-recovery.com>
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Date: Mon, 08 May 2006 13:22:36 +0200
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On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 13:13 +0200, Erik Mouw wrote:
> On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 09:50:39AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > This is probably because the number of pdflush threads slowly grows to its
> > maximum.  This is bogus, and we seem to have broken it sometime in the past
> > few releases.  I need to find a few quality hours to get in there and fix
> > it, but they're rare :(
> > 
> > It's pretty harmless though.  The "load average" thing just means that the
> > extra pdflush threads are twiddling thumbs waiting on some disk I/O -
> > they'll later exit and clean themselves up.  They won't be consuming
> > significant resources.
> 
> Not completely harmless. Some daemons (sendmail, exim) use the load
> average to decide if they will allow more work.

and those need to be fixed most likely ;)


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