Re: [PATCH] O17int

Wes Janzen
2003-08-22T20:45:43Z

Yep, those are very bad stalls, much worse than the normal temporary
stalls when something is running in the background. I think part of
that can be attributed to mozilla, which likes to do very little for a
while, then jump up to 5% for a little bit and then up to 35% for 5
seconds or so.
With something running in the background, things get very bad. Those
vmstat were supposed to be reported at 5 second intervals, but they were
not being reported at the rate during the problem. Those represent
about 5 minutes of stalling. I could live with a short stall, but 5
minutes where the computer barely takes input is crazy. X becomes
totally unresponsive to the point I cannot switch to a VT.

I started a shutdown one time with the acipd daemon watching for power
button events. It took 1 hour 30 minutes from the time it said that it
was shutting down (I could hear the beep from the shutdown process) to
the point I got to "Stopping at daemon" which is barely into the
shutdown cycle. Even then I waited another 10 minutes for it to
complete the shutdown and it never did. All I was doing there was
compiling in a gnome-terminal, and had just clicked on a bug-buddy
window to get it to show debugging information. I couldn't get to a VT
so I wasn't able to get a vmstat log of that one.

Even if this is due to a bad interaction between a program and X, it
shouldn't be able to bring the system to its knees.

Kernel version:
2.6.0-test3-mm2 + O16.3int

Mike Galbraith wrote:

>
> Those high interrupt counts are all stalls? What kernel is that?
>