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

[Marc G. Fournier]

On Sat, 24 Jun 2006, Kostik Belousov wrote:

> 2. 2 Giant holders/lockers. Is it constant ? Are the processes holding/waiting
> for Giant are the same ?

Mostly appears to be 'clock' ...

pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.03 [swi4: clock]
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.03 [swi4: clock]
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.03 [swi4: clock]
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.03 [swi4: clock]
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.03 [swi4: clock]
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0 92517 46540 114 110  0  5032  2412 Giant  LV+   p4    0:00.00 -csh (csh)
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.04 [swi4: clock]
  1001 14098     1   0  96  0  3308  1324 Giant  LsJ   ??    0:04.98 /usr/local/libexec/postfix/master
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
     0    12     0   0 -32  0     0     8 Giant  LL    ??    3:07.04 [swi4: clock]
pluto# ps axlww | grep Giant | grep -v grep
pluto#

And I suspect that the master is disk i/o, since the iir driver is listed as still GIANT-LOCKED:

iir0: <Intel Integrated RAID Controller> mem 0xfc8f0000-0xfc8f3fff irq 30 at device 9.0 on pci1
iir0: [GIANT-LOCKED]

> Ah, and does dmesg show anything ?

Anything (other then the iir driver) that I'd be looking for in there?  Or 
could that be what is compounding the problem?  Too many things trying to 
acquire GIANT over the drive(s), creating a deadlock?  Long shot there ... 
?

----
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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