2.4.0-release (and a few priors) stalls

[David Ford]

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Recently, about test 12 I believe, I started experiencing stalls.
I believe it has to do with VM pressure but I'm not sure.

What happens:  5-60 second instant dead stall, nothing at all happens.
No sound/key/disk/anything activity, screen updates stop in the middle
of an update.  Until recently I was mistaking this as a lockup and
rebooting (thank you reiserfs).  Now I just wait it out.  I'm away for
holiday/vacation so I can't hookup kbd. :(

Environment: normally swap is full -but- buffers can have any amount of
free listed, sometimes well over 100 megs.

After the stall resumes, everything starts right up and sings along
fine.  There aren't any kernel messages indicating something was funny.

This is different from running out of normal pages, the system starts to
thrash and slows considerably, almost unusable, but over a period of
10-20 seconds.  If I add swap quickly, X won't get killed.
(unfortunately, X seems to get killed 9/10 times because netscape took
too long to die so the kernel kept killing).

-d

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