I've seen something similar to this in Solaris10 (that Oracle won't fix).
It was diganosed as basically 'storage is too slow to service requests.
Throw more hardware at it.". What happens is that nfs buffers just keep
building up and building up (even if it's a read request storm) and the I/O
syste
We now have a reproducable situation where high NFS load can cause our
specific fileserver configuration to lock up with what looks like a
memory exhaustion deadlock. So far, attempts to get a crash dump haven't
worked (although they may someday). Without a crash dump, what system
stats and so on
