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Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2012 22:00:06 +0200 (EET)
From: Dimitrios Apostolou <jimis@gmx.net>
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To: Eric Paris <eparis@parisplace.org>, "Theodore Ts'o" <tytso@mit.edu>
cc: Roland Eggner <edvx1@systemanalysen.net>,
        Linux Kernel Mailing List <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>,
        Catalin Marinas <catalin.marinas@arm.com>
Subject: Re: backing up ext4 fs, system unresponsive, thrashing like crazy
 even though swap is unused
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On Mon, 3 Dec 2012, Dimitrios Apostolou wrote:
>
> I've managed to reproduce the scenario with concurrent "du" commands running 
> on the filesystems. I'll try doing it once more, but it may take a while to 
> get the dmesg/slabinfo etc output, since even a realtime root shell is 
> non-responsive for many minutes.
>
> What other debug output do you suggest to get, to find out why ext4 inodes 
> are pinned?

Important detail: one of the filesystems contains *huge* maildirs, 
containing hundreds of thousands of messages.


Dimitris