Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 03:33:36 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@linux-foundation.org>
To: richard kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk>
Cc: Chuck Ebbert <cebbert@redhat.com>, Matthias Hensler <matthias@wspse.de>,
       linux-kernel <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
       Thomas Gleixner <tglx@linutronix.de>,
       Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Subject: Re: Processes spinning forever, apparently in lock_timer_base()?
Message-Id: <20070921033336.c327ffd9.akpm@linux-foundation.org>
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On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:25:41 +0100 richard kennedy <richard@rsk.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> > That's all a bit crappy if the wrong races happen and some other task is
> > somehow exceeding the dirty limits each time this task polls them.  Seems
> > unlikely that such a condition would persist forever.
> > 
> > So the question is, why do we have large amounts of dirty pages for one
> > disk which appear to be sitting there not getting written?
> 
> The lockup I'm seeing intermittently occurs when I have 2+ tasks copying
> large files (1Gb+) on sda & a small read-mainly mysql db app running on
> sdb. The lockup seems to happen just after the copies finish -- there
> are lots of dirty pages but nothing left to write them until kupdate
> gets round to it. 

Then what happens?  The system recovers?
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