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

From: Erik Mouw
Date: Mon May 08 2006 - 11:41:53 EST


On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 05:31:29PM +0200, Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-05-08 at 17:22 +0200, Erik Mouw wrote:
> > ... except that any kernel < 2.6 didn't account tasks waiting for disk
> > IO.
>
> they did. It was "D" state, which counted into load average.

They did not or at least to a much lesser extent. That's the reason why
ZenIV.linux.org.uk had a mail DoS during the last FC release and why we
see load average questions on lkml.

I've seen it on our servers as well: when using 2.4 and doing 50 MB/s
to disk (through NFS), the load just was slightly above 0. When we
switched the servers to 2.6 it went to ~16 for the same disk usage.


Erik

--
+-- Erik Mouw -- www.harddisk-recovery.com -- +31 70 370 12 90 --
| Lab address: Delftechpark 26, 2628 XH, Delft, The Netherlands
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