Re: Kernel 2.6.8.1: swap storm of death - nr_requests > 1024 on swap partition

William Lee Irwin III
2004-08-29T17:52:34Z

On Sat, Aug 28 2004, William Lee Irwin III wrote:
>> It certainly appears to be the deciding factor from the thread.

On Sun, Aug 29, 2004 at 06:54:59PM +0200, Jens Axboe wrote:
> Has nothing to do with the io scheduler itself, apart from the fact that
> CFQ exposes the problem by setting a larger q->nr_requests. And that is
> the very deciding factor, not the io scheduler.

Then it's narrower still, q->nr_requests. What a priori reasons are
there for this to vomit? clear_queue_congested() seems to be called
only when a request is retired, so a large number of requests in flight
may be doing something unexpected, and I'd expect large q->nr_requests
to keep large numbers of requests around. Hmm...

-- wli