On Sunday 05 August 2007 20:58:15 Rafał Bilski wrote: > > Hello again, > > Hi! > > > was my report so complicated? Perhaps I shouldn't have included so many > > oprofile outputs. Anyway, if anyone wants to have a look, the most > > important is two_discs_bad.txt oprofile output, attached on my original > > message. The problem is 100% reproducible for me so I would appreciate if > > anyone told me he has similar experiences. > > Probably nobody replied to Your message because people at this list think > that Your problem isn't kernel related. In this moment I'm using "Arch > Linux" too, so I checked /etc/cron directory. There simple jobs You are > talking about are not so simple: > - update the "locate" database, > - update the "whatis" database. > Both jobs are scaning "/" partition. I don't know how dcron works, but I > can imagine situation in which it is polling cron.daily and says: "hey it > wasn't done today yet" and it is starting same jobs over and over again. > More and more tasks scans the "/" partition and in result access is slower > and slower.
Hello and thanks for your reply. The cron job that is running every 10 min on my system is mpop (a fetchmail-like program) and another running every 5 min is mrtg. Both normally finish within 1-2 seconds. The fact that these simple cron jobs don't finish ever is certainly because of the high system CPU load. If you see the two_discs_bad.txt which I attached on my original message, you'll see that *vmlinux*, and specifically the *scheduler*, take up most time. And the fact that this happens only when running two i/o processes but when running only one everything is absolutely snappy (not at all slow, see one_disc.txt), makes me sure that this is a kernel bug. I'd be happy to help but I need some guidance to pinpoint the problem. Thanks, Dimitris - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
