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

From: Nick Piggin
Date: Mon May 08 2006 - 22:01:10 EST


Arjan van de Ven 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.


Perhaps kernel threads in D state should not contribute toward load avg.

Userspace does not care whether there are 2 or 20 pdflush threads waiting
for IO. However, when the network/disks can no longer keep up, userspace
processes will end up going to sleep in writeback or reclaim -- *that* is
when we start feeling the load.

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