performance and hanging issues

[Arjen Wolfs <arjen@xxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

Since I only just subscribed here this might have been discussed before, 
but browsing through the archives I couldn't find anything about it so here 
goes:

I am running 2.4.2-XFS (checked out of cvs) on a SMP box with 1G of memory, 
and have am having some serious issues with it. When creating a large 
number of files (a few thousand) on the XFS parition, the process will run 
along nicely for a while and then slow to a complete crawl; the process 
goes into an uninterruptable sleep (D), and the load goes up to ~1,5 with 
no process using any cpu. It might be stuck in this state for a minute or 
two, and then continue as normal for a while before the processes repeats 
itself.

After about 3 days of uptime the box came to a complete halt, forcing a 
hard reset. It had the following messaged logged (though not at the time it 
froze):

Apr 24 05:54:31 kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed.
Apr 24 05:54:31 kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed.

Apr 24 10:58:30 kernel: __alloc_pages: 0-order allocation failed.
Apr 24 10:58:30 last message repeated 11 times

The box froze about 40 minutes after that last log entry above. I know this 
all isn't very scientific and I can obviously attempt to provide more 
information.

Any help would be extremely very greatly appreciated,

/Arjen Wolfs