Re: filesystem access slowing system to a crawl

Andrew Morton
2003-02-05T09:29:17Z

>
> Hi,
>
> maybe you could help me out with a really weird problem we're having
> with a NFS fileserver for a couple of webservers:
>
> - Dual Xeon 2.2 GHz
> - 6 GB RAM
> - QLogic FCAL Host adapter with about 5.5 TB on a several RAIDs
> - Debian "woody" w/Kernel 2.4.19
>
> Running just "find /" (or ls -R or tar on a large directory) locally
> slows the box down to absolute unresponsiveness - it takes minutes
> to just run ps and kill the find process. During that time, kupdated
> and kswapd gobble up all available CPU time.
>

Could be that your "low memory" is filled up with inodes. This would
only happen in these tests if you're using ext2, and there are a *lot*
of directories.

I've prepared a lineup of Andrea's VM patches at

http://www.zip.com.au/~akpm/linux/patches/2.4/2.4.21-pre4/

It would be useful if you could apply 10_inode-highmem-2.patch and
report back. It applies to 2.4.19 as well, and should work OK there.