Re: filesystem access slowing system to a crawl

Denis Vlasenko
2003-02-05T09:05:02Z

On 4 February 2003 11:29, Thomas B?tzler wrote:
> 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.
>
> The system performs great otherwise, so I've ruled out a hardware
> problem. It can't be a load problem because during normal operation,
> the system is more or less bored out of its mind (70-90% idle time).
>
> I'm really at the end of my wits here :-(
>
> Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Canned response:
* does non-highmem kernel make any difference?
* does UP kernel make any difference?
* can you profile kernel while "time ls -R" is running?
* try 2.4.20 and/or .21-pre4
* tell us what you found out
--
vda