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Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2006 01:52:57 -0700
From: Andrew Morton <akpm@osdl.org>
To: David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>
Cc: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org, linux-fsdevel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: shrink_dcache_sb scalability problem.
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David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com> wrote:
>
> After recently upgrading a build machine to 2.6.16, we started
>  seeing 10-50s pauses where the machine would appear to hang.

This sounds like the recent thread "Avoid excessive time spend on
concurrent slab shrinking" over on linux-mm.  Have you read through that?

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&r=1&b=200603&w=2
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-mm&r=3&b=200604&w=2

It ended up somewaht inconclusive, but it looks like we do have a bit of a
problem, but it got exacerbated by an XFS slowness.