Livelock seen on current with threaded processes

[Kevin Oberman]

> From: "Daniel Eriksson" <daniel_k_eriksson at telia.com>
> Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 02:40:02 +0200
> 
> Kevin Oberman wrote:
> 
> > I run transcode on a video file to convert it to divx4 using the xvid4
> > library. I do this with nice set to 10 and top confirms that it is set
> > to 10. At various times, the system starts locking up. Windows won't
> > refresh. Shell commands never execute (nor do keys echo) in 
> > some windows
> > including syscons vtys. If my gkrellm is still alive (and it usually
> > is), I see the system at 97% CPU and nothing else busy. There 
> > is a bit a
> > disk I/O but not much.
> 
> This sounds a lot like the problems I described in the thread "Serious I/O
> problems (bad performance and live-lock)" from a few weeks ago. It seems
> that when the VM subsystem is put under pressure the machine comes to a
> grinding halt. In my case I could trigger this with a simple 'dd' (on a
> filesystem, not on a raw device).

Yes, it does sound similar. I was hoping that your thread would lead to
a resolution of my problem. I can certainly believe that the problem is
VM related. Unfortunately, I believe the work-around was to set
debug.mpsafevm to 1, but that didn't seem to help at my case at all.

Am I remembering correctly?
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman at es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634