Re: [PATCH] O17int

From: Wes Janzen
Date: Fri Aug 22 2003 - 15:47:24 EST


Yep, those are very bad stalls, much worse than the normal temporary stalls when something is running in the background. I think part of that can be attributed to mozilla, which likes to do very little for a while, then jump up to 5% for a little bit and then up to 35% for 5 seconds or so. With something running in the background, things get very bad. Those vmstat were supposed to be reported at 5 second intervals, but they were not being reported at the rate during the problem. Those represent about 5 minutes of stalling. I could live with a short stall, but 5 minutes where the computer barely takes input is crazy. X becomes totally unresponsive to the point I cannot switch to a VT.

I started a shutdown one time with the acipd daemon watching for power button events. It took 1 hour 30 minutes from the time it said that it was shutting down (I could hear the beep from the shutdown process) to the point I got to "Stopping at daemon" which is barely into the shutdown cycle. Even then I waited another 10 minutes for it to complete the shutdown and it never did. All I was doing there was compiling in a gnome-terminal, and had just clicked on a bug-buddy window to get it to show debugging information. I couldn't get to a VT so I wasn't able to get a vmstat log of that one.

Even if this is due to a bad interaction between a program and X, it shouldn't be able to bring the system to its knees.

Kernel version:
2.6.0-test3-mm2 + O16.3int



Mike Galbraith wrote:


Those high interrupt counts are all stalls? What kernel is that?


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