ioflush

[Patrick Welche <prlw1%cam.ac.uk@localhost>]

ioflush was consuming rather a lot of CPU _before_ I started a pkgsrc
build, and it is even defeating the compiler.

  PID   LID USERNAME PRI STATE      TIME   WCPU    CPU NAME      COMMAND
    0   199 root     124 syncer/1 199:47 40.33% 40.33% ioflush   [system]
16927     1 root      25 RUN/0      0:00 33.83%  3.22% -         cc1
 8929     1 root      26 CPU/3      0:00 28.70%  2.73% -         cc1
29674     1 root      26 RUN/12     0:00 24.60%  2.34% -         cc1

The system (32GB of real memory, and 32GB of unused swap) feels resource
starved... It spent the night bulk building, and was sitting idle with
32% CPU on ioflush being the only process doing anything.

Normal?

Cheers,

Patrick