Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2007 10:33:17 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: high system cpu load during intense disk i/o
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On Mon, 06 Aug 2007 16:20:30 +0200 Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net> wrote:

> Andrew Morton wrote:
> > On Sun, 5 Aug 2007 19:03:12 +0300 Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net> wrote:
> > 
> >> was my report so complicated?
> > 
> > We're bad.
> > 
> > Seems that your context switch rate when running two instances of
> > badblocks against two different disks went batshit insane.  It doesn't
> > happen here.
> > 
> > Please capture the `vmstat 1' output while running the problematic
> > workload.
> > 
> > The oom-killing could have been unrelated to the CPU load problem.  iirc
> > badblocks uses a lot of memory, so it might have been genuine.  Keep an eye
> > on the /proc/meminfo output and send the kernel dmesg output from the
> > oom-killing event.
> 
> Please see the attached files. Unfortunately I don't see any useful info 
> in them:
> 	*_before: before running any badblocks process
> 	*_while: while running badblocks process, but without any cron job 
> having kicked in
> 	*_bad: 5 minutes later that some cron jobs kicked in
> 
> About the OOM killer, indeed I believe that it is unrelated. It started 
> killing after about 2 days, that hundreds of processes were stuck as 
> running and taking up memory, so I suppose the 256 MB RAM were truly 
> filled. I just mentioned it because its behaviour is completely 
> non-helpful. It doesn't touch the badblocks process, it rarely touches 
> the stuck as running cron jobs, but it kills other irrelevant processes. 
> If you still want the killing logs, tell me and I'll search for them.

ah.  Your context-switch rate during the dual-badblocks run is not high at
all.

I suspect I was fooled by the oprofile output, which showed tremendous
amounts of load in schedule() and switch_to().  The percentages which
opreport shows are the percentage of non-halted CPU time.  So if you have a
function in the kernel which is using 1% of the total CPU, and the CPU is
halted for 95% of the time, it appears that the function is taking 20% of
CPU!

The fix for that is to boot with the "idle=poll" boot parameter, to make
the CPU spin when it has nothing else to do.

I'm suspecting that your machine is just stuck in D state waiting for disk.
 Did we have a sysrq-T trace? 
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