Re: Strange behavior on the 2.4.18 XFS tree?

[Michael Sinz <msinz@wgate.com>]

Steve Lord wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-05-15 at 07:35, Keith Owens wrote:
> 
>>On Wed, 15 May 2002 07:30:09 -0400, 
>>Michael Sinz <msinz@wgate.com> wrote:
>>
>>>I have only been able to see this behavior on my system running the
>>>kernel from the 2.4 XFS CVS tree.  It is somewhat reproduceable.
>>>
>>>The problem is that I started up a number of "rxvt" sessions and they
>>>took well over a minute to start up.  During that time, the cpu
>>>utilization was almost nil.  (Less than 1%)
>>>
>>>There was a background find operation happening, and this seems to be
>>>the key item.
>>
>>When the problem occurs, does typing sync get everything running again?
>>I have been seeing an intermittent lock problem with XFS where
>>everything stops until some other disk activity kicks in and the lock
>>is released.
> 
> I wish people would tell us things like this when they happen.

If I can make a better (more reliable) mechanism to repeat this, I
will send it to you.  It has happened a number of times in the last
two days.

> For the record, there is no use of the BKL in xfs at all. Michael's
> problem sounds more like memory getting chewed up by the dcache and
> icache.

Ahh, I have seen this happen in the past - I have not understood why
so much memory was used at times in the system.  The machine is running
headless (no local X display) and thus it should have lots of resources.

Is there something specific you would like me to try?

-- 
Michael Sinz ---- Worldgate Communications ---- msinz@wgate.com
A master's secrets are only as good as
	the master's ability to explain them to others.