vmstat 'b' (disk busy?) field keeps climbing ...

[Charles Swiger]

On Jun 23, 2006, at 4:44 PM, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>  procs      memory      page                    disks      
> faults      cpu
>  r b w     avm    fre  flt  re  pi  po  fr  sr da0 pa0   in   sy   
> cs us sy id
>  1 42 1 10249060 161668 1290  54  12   3 1409 2202 102   0  751  
> 6416 3350 24 15 61
>  0 39 0 10148976 148104  654  10   5   2 660   0  49   0  615 4440  
> 2584 18  9 73
>
> the last time it hung, it hit about 45 ... about 6 hours ago, it  
> was at ~5-10 ... anything I should look at to figure out where  
> those 39+ are 'busy'?

'b' stands for "blocked", not "busy".  Judging by your page fault  
rate and the high number of frees and pages being scanned, you're  
probably swapping tasks in and out and are waiting on disk.  Take a  
look at "vmstat -s", and consider adding more RAM if this is correct...

> The system is running a May 25th kernel of FreeBSD 6-STABLE .. Dual- 
> PIII ...

-- 
-Chuck