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

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Kostik Belousov wrote:

> On Sat, Jun 24, 2006 at 11:55:26AM +0400, Dmitry Morozovsky wrote:
>> On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Marc G. Fournier wrote:
>>
>> MGF> > 'b' stands for "blocked", not "busy".  Judging by your page fault rate
>> MGF> > and the high number of frees and pages being scanned, you're probably
>> MGF> > swapping tasks in and out and are waiting on disk.  Take a look at
>> MGF> > "vmstat -s", and consider adding more RAM if this is correct...
>> MGF>
>> MGF> is there a way of finding out what processes are blocked?
>>
>> Aren't they in 'D' status by ps?
> Use ps axlww. In this way, at least actual blocking points are shown.

'k, stupid question then ... what am I searching for?

# ps axlww | awk '{print $9}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr
  654 select
  230 lockf
  166 wait
   85 -
   80 piperd
   71 nanslp
   33 kserel
   22 user
   10 pause
    9 ttyin
    5 sbwait
    3 psleep
    3 accept
    2 kqread
    2 Giant
    1 vlruwt
    1 syncer
    1 sdflus
    1 ppwait
    1 ktrace
    1 MWCHAN

According to vmstat, I'm holding at '4 blocked' for the most part ... 
sbwwait is socket related, not disk ... and none of the others look right 
...



---- Marc G. Fournier Hub.Org Networking Services (http://www.hub.org) 
Email . scrappy at hub.org MSN . scrappy at hub.org Yahoo . yscrappy Skype: 
hub.org ICQ . 7615664