system slowdown - vnode related

[Mike Harding]

I'm running a very recent RELENG-4 - but I had a suspicion that this was
unionfs related, so I unmounted the /usr/ports union mounts under a jail
in case this was causing the problem, and haven't seen the problem
since.  It's possible I accidently reverted to 4.8 when I built a
release, but I don't see how...

On Sat, 2003-05-24 at 15:04, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
> 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.
> > _______________________________________________
> > freebsd-stable at freebsd.org mailing list
> > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-stable
> > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-stable-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
> >
> 
> Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
> Systems Administrator @ hub.org
> primary: scrappy at hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org