Re: Processes stuck in D state (leading to extremely high load)

[Federico Sevilla III <jijo@free.net.ph>]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2003 at 02:29:39PM +0200, Stefan Roehrich wrote:
> we have a "Processes stuck in D state" problem here for a long time.
> It occurrs with different kernel/xfs versions (smp always enabled in
> kernel):
>
> ...
>
> As time goes by (depending on user activity), load increases to really
> high values (90 or so) as more and more procceses accessing the not
> reacting filesystem get stuck in D state.  Finally the system does not
> react anymore.
> 
> This is not depending on samba. It also happens with any other
> application (i. e. apache) accessing an XFS mounted filesystem. It
> seems to be filesystem specific, i.e. only processes on one XFS
> filesystem are "running" in D state, not on another mounted XFS
> filesystem.
> 
> It is a production system and it takes an averge of about a week after
> a reboot until this happens, but isn't exactly reproducable.

I used to have that problem as well, and was very frustrated because I
just couldn't nail the cause. I haven't been seing the problem, though,
and it seems to have all stopped when I changed my SDRAM which MemTest86
found to have some very minor hard-to-find errors. Perhaps you could
give this a shot? It'll need some time to finish all the passes, though,
and the machine will have to be offline during the tests. I know that's
not welcome news for a production box.

Good luck.

 --> Jijo
 
-- 
Federico Sevilla III  : http://jijo.free.net.ph      : When we speak of free
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