waiting on sbwait
Robert Watson
rwatson at freebsd.org
Thu Jun 24 20:36:02 PDT 2004
On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Danny Braniss wrote:
> sometimes we get
> load: 0.04 cmd: dmesg 13453 [nfsrcvlk] 0.00u 0.00s 0% 148k
>
> and looking through the code, there might be some connection between
> sbwait and nfsrcvlk, but i doubt that it's sockets that im running out
> off, neither mbufs, since:
>
> foundation> netstat -m
> 326/1216/26624 mbufs in use (current/peak/max):
> 326 mbufs allocated to data
> 321/428/6656 mbuf clusters in use (current/peak/max)
> 1160 Kbytes allocated to network (5% of mb_map in use)
> 0 requests for memory denied
> 0 requests for memory delayed
> 0 calls to protocol drain routines
>
> also, the process enters sbwait either in sosend or soreceive, make me
> believe that it's some resource, rather than data, that is missing.
>
> the fact that this 'unresponsivness' happens sometimes is making this
> rather challenging, but try to tell this to the users :-)
sbwait() occurs when a thread is blocked in a socket waiting for space in
the socket to send, or for data in the socket on a receive. This can
happen either because a process is directly performing socket I/O -- for
example, sending or receiving on a TCP or UDP socket -- or, it can happen
when a process is using a facility that performs socket I/O in its kernel
thread. For example, the NFS client. So the sbwait state could be a
result of filled buffers of NFS. If I had to guess, it might well be NFS.
However, there are actually ways to tell :-).
The easiest is to compile your kernel with DDB, and when a process hangs
with those symptoms, break into the debugger and do a trace on its pid.
You'll get back a stack trace. If it's using a send/recv system call that
terminates in the socket code without hitting VFS/NFS, it's blocked on
network I/O, perhaps because it's sending or receiving a lot of data and
hasn't finished. If you see it pass through NFS-related functions, then
it's waiting for NFS network I/O, which could reflect a busy NFS server,
network segment, packet loss, etc.
Robert N M Watson FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert at fledge.watson.org Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research
More information about the freebsd-hackers
mailing list