Re: Processes spinning forever, apparently in lock_timer_base()?

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Sep 21 2007 - 06:35:15 EST


On Fri, 21 Sep 2007 11:25:41 +0100 richard kennedy <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> > That's all a bit crappy if the wrong races happen and some other task is
> > somehow exceeding the dirty limits each time this task polls them. Seems
> > unlikely that such a condition would persist forever.
> >
> > So the question is, why do we have large amounts of dirty pages for one
> > disk which appear to be sitting there not getting written?
>
> The lockup I'm seeing intermittently occurs when I have 2+ tasks copying
> large files (1Gb+) on sda & a small read-mainly mysql db app running on
> sdb. The lockup seems to happen just after the copies finish -- there
> are lots of dirty pages but nothing left to write them until kupdate
> gets round to it.

Then what happens? The system recovers?
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