Re: Suspected bug - System slowdown under unexplained excessive disk

[Oktay Akbal]

On Wed, 7 Nov 2001, Sasha Pachev wrote:

> Summary:
>
> System slowdown under unexplained excessive disk I/O
>
> Full description:
>
> While running X, KDE, having a few windows open, I ran make -j4 on MySQL
> source tree. I do this all the time and it usually works just fine - the
> system is a little bit unresponsive. However, occasionally the system becomes
> completely unresponsive - the disk goes crazy, the machine pings but neither
> ssh or telnet work - connection to the port is established, but nothing
> further than that. It does respond to magic SysRQ. I was able to get a memory
> info dump + stack traces into syslog, included below. The filesystem is
> ReiserFS.

I had a similar Problem while running sql-bench on Mysql ( must be mysql :-) ).
First I thought it happened since the Mysql-Tables were on the root-fs and
the Disk did not manage to retrieve normal libs and files for login usw.
But the System (2.4.14-pre8) took about 25 seconds to give a screen after
wakening from  apm (triggered by xscreensaver under gnome).
Console-Switching took even longer. Mouse-Movement stopped etc.
Disk-Activity was very high.

I had seen smaller Problems with huge loads on the root-fs earlier. But
never had a Problem with switching consoles or mouse.

Oktay