Very poor IO performance (high CPU load), libata

[Carsten Otto <c-otto@gmx.de>]

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Hello (again)!

System specs below.

My system sometimes[1] crashes in the sense that every HDD access is slow
as hell and most of both CPUs' power is used for IO waiting. Then "top"
shows more than 80% "wa" and the corresponding counter in /proc/stat
increases a lot. When plotting these values with rrdtool I see up to 5%
IO wait with normal behaviour and peaks with up to 40% under heavy load.

In the problem case the IO wait never drops below 40% no matter how light
the HDD load is. Logging in into the system via SSH then takes more than
two minutes and other tasks are equally slow.

Disabling AHCI/ACPI/SMP in the kernel did not help.
I also tried several kernel versions including 2.6.16 to 2.6.18 (rc,
mm).

/proc/interrupts shows a lot of interrupts for my network cards, but
disabling the network does not solve the problem.

A reboot usually solves the problem for some time.

There might be a problem with my hardware (in a not yet determined
device) causing this problem. But as long as I do not know what is wrong
I still see the chance of a software error in the kernel.

System specs:
- Mainboard with Intel 945p and iCH7R (Foxconn 945P7AA-8EKRS2)
- Intel Pentium D 805 (Dual Core, 2.66 GHz, 1 MB cache each)
- 4x Maxtor MaXLine III (300GB, 16MB Cache, SATA2)

[1] Sometimes: More than daily, at the moment I am lucky and noticed no
problem for hours.

Thanks a lot,
-- 
Carsten Otto
c-otto@gmx.de
www.c-otto.de

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