Re: RH 8; intermittend very high load

From: Tommy Reynolds (TommyReynolds_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 04/28/04 

Date: Tue, 27 Apr 2004 19:48:33 -0500

On Tue, 27 Apr 2004 21:50:37 +0200, Stephan Wonczak wrote:

> To me this sounds like something is wedged in 'D'-state; maybe an I/O
> issue. The 2.4 VM is well-known for ... 'creative' behaviour.
>
> Look at the output of "ps -ealf | grep ' D '" and see if there are any
> stuck processes (during the time of high load, of course :-) ). Also
> looking at /proc/meminfo and /proc/slabinfo might provide clues.

Those two "/proc" entries are good places to look for memory
thrashing and/or swap issues.

I don't get the connection with a process simply waiting in
un-interruptable sleep causing a process scheduling backlog. As
long as a process is on the un-interruptable wait queue the kernel
doesn't even see the process anymore during schedule time; it does
not get woken up for signal delivery or semaphore releases.

Can you enlightenment about this? No quibble about earlier 2.4 VM
being buggy, but after about 2.4.14 this smoothed out pretty well.

HEY! ORIGINAL POSTER! What does the 'uname -r' program say?

Cheers!