On Sun, Mar 07, 2004 at 02:09:41PM +0100, Frank van der Linden wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 10:36:06PM +0000, Andreas Kahari wrote:
> > Another thing:  If I mount my drives with softdep, the system
> > sometimes "freezes" for short periods of time (about 3-5
> > seconds or so).  This seems to occur under heavy disk activity
> > (rebuilding userland) when the pagedeamon process which will
> > use a lot of CPU periodically.  Is this a known issue, or a
> > non-issue?  I thought it was annoying enough to make me disable
> > softdep.
> 
> Yes, that's a known issue. There are some discussions going on
> how to fix this, basically it's a flaw in the trickle syncer.

Same here, under low free memory conditions (many NFS reads).

I don't know if that helps; but we noticed, under such circumstances,
that removing all swap partition/files let the system behave a lot
better ... without hangs.

-- 
Nicolas Joly

Biological Software and Databanks.
Institut Pasteur, Paris.