Re: Suspected bug - System slowdown under unexplained excessive disk I/O - 2.4.13

[David Rees <dbr@greenhydrant.com>]

On Wed, Nov 07, 2001 at 09:25:38PM -0700, Sasha Pachev wrote:
> 
> Summary: 
> 
> System slowdown under unexplained excessive disk I/O 
> 
> Full description: 
> 
> While running X, KDE, having a few windows open, I ran make -j4 on MySQL 
> source tree. I do this all the time and it usually works just fine - the 
> system is a little bit unresponsive. However, occasionally the system becomes 
> completely unresponsive - the disk goes crazy, the machine pings but neither 
> ssh or telnet work - connection to the port is established, but nothing 
> further than that. It does respond to magic SysRQ. I was able to get a memory 
> info dump + stack traces into syslog, included below. The filesystem is 
> ReiserFS.
> 
> Keywords: 
> 
> vm, ReiserFS, heavy disk I/O,

Let me guess, IDE disks?  Anyway, this is a FAQ.  Go www.namesys.com, click
on the FAQ, and look at #15.

This issue really can be a problem as the entire machine will freeze up for
a good chunk of time while the disk churns away.  Strangely enough, I've
only noticed it on some machines, not all.  But it's enough of a problem to
cause me to switch to ext3.

-Dave