Re: High load average on disk I/O on 2.6.17-rc3

From: Arjan van de Ven
Date: Mon May 08 2006 - 07:22:20 EST


On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 13:13 +0200, Erik Mouw wrote:
> On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 09:50:39AM -0700, Andrew Morton wrote:
> > This is probably because the number of pdflush threads slowly grows to its
> > maximum. This is bogus, and we seem to have broken it sometime in the past
> > few releases. I need to find a few quality hours to get in there and fix
> > it, but they're rare :(
> >
> > It's pretty harmless though. The "load average" thing just means that the
> > extra pdflush threads are twiddling thumbs waiting on some disk I/O -
> > they'll later exit and clean themselves up. They won't be consuming
> > significant resources.
>
> Not completely harmless. Some daemons (sendmail, exim) use the load
> average to decide if they will allow more work.

and those need to be fixed most likely ;)


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