system slowdown - vnode related

[The Hermit Hacker]

Hi Mike ...

  What version of FreeBSD are you running?  There were several fixes put
in just after 4.8 was released, one of which dealt with freeing up vnodes,
since I was hitting similar problems on our server where we're using
unionfs ...

On Wed, 21 May 2003, Mike Harding wrote:

>
> I woke up to a frozen box this morning - it froze up a few more times
> before I got a handle on it.
>
> Basically, the box runs idle but refuses to do disk IO, or does it
> -very- slowly.
>
> Top shows processes stuck in 'ffsvget', 'inode', and 'vlruwk' state.
>
> I can get the box responsive again by setting sysctl
> kern.maxvnods=100000.  It starts up with kern.maxnodes=36079.  I don't
> know yet if this is a 'fix' - I wanted to send this mail out before
> the box froze again.
>
> I can reliably get the box in to this state by doing 'find /'.  I do
> have a lot of files on the disk, and a things like squid and postgres
> that do a lot of file i/o, but I don't recall this happening before
> this week.  I don't find anything in 'tuning' about bumping up vnodes,
> but I do see sporadic reports on a google group search - searching for
> 'ffsvgt'.
>
> Anybody run into this before?
>
> - Mike H.
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Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
Systems Administrator @ hub.org
primary: scrappy at hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org