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

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Fri, 23 Jun 2006, Charles Swiger wrote:

> 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...

is there a way of finding out what processes are blocked?

----
Marc G. Fournier           Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org)
Email . scrappy at hub.org                              MSN . scrappy at hub.org
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