Re: [Xen-devel] Re: kernel BUG at mm/swapfile.c:2527! [was 3.0.0 Xen pv guest - BUG: Unable to handle]

[Kent Hoxsey <khoxsey@paradigm-healthcare.com>]

I am arriving to this discussion via a pointer on the Amazon AWS forums. There appear to be a number of threads with people experiencing some version of this issue (high IOwait%, httpd cpu load spike, etc.)

I currently have an AWS instance that appears to experience this problem every day at the same time (1:50pm Pacific), but has enough cpu horsepower to handle the surge and recover. Since it is a part of my production infrastructure, I cannot allow other people to log in, but I can certainly run diagnostics to help identify the issue. If anyone would like to suggest what diagnostics would be helpful I will try to collect them.

Kent
+++
As an example, following is a snip from mpstat during the load spike. Watching top at the same time, all of the httpd processes jump from 0.2% cpu to 15% or more, and then recover together once the spike passes:

08:49:31 PM  CPU    %usr   %nice    %sys %iowait    %irq   %soft  %steal  %guest   %idle
...
08:49:46 PM  all    2.53    0.00    0.35    0.15    0.00    0.10    0.00    0.00   96.86
08:49:51 PM  all    3.63    0.00    0.52    0.16    0.00    0.10    0.05    0.00   95.53
08:49:56 PM  all    6.77    0.00    3.44    0.22    0.00    0.16    0.00    0.00   89.40
08:50:01 PM  all   53.19    0.00   41.04    0.00    0.00    0.30    5.48    0.00    0.00
08:50:06 PM  all   57.62    0.00   35.25    0.10    0.00    1.19    4.75    0.00    1.09
08:50:11 PM  all   34.85    0.00   19.09   43.20    0.00    0.77    0.46    0.00    1.62
08:50:16 PM  all   50.85    0.00   19.54   26.88    0.00    0.51    0.09    0.00    2.13
08:50:21 PM  all   31.87    0.00   16.87   49.18    0.00    0.45    0.07    0.00    1.57
08:50:26 PM  all   31.83    0.00   15.73   49.63    0.00    0.52    0.00    0.00    2.29
08:50:31 PM  all   30.50    0.00   16.91   51.03    0.00    0.30    0.07    0.00    1.18
08:50:36 PM  all   30.83    0.00   18.24   49.66    0.00    0.22    0.00    0.00    1.04
08:50:41 PM  all   33.58    0.00   15.86   48.47    0.00    0.22    0.07    0.00    1.79
08:50:46 PM  all   51.06    0.00   18.04   24.30    0.00    0.76    2.03    0.00    3.81
08:50:51 PM  all   69.61    0.00   23.73    0.39    0.00    0.39    4.22    0.00    1.67
08:50:56 PM  all   72.11    0.00   21.41    0.00    0.00    0.50    5.98    0.00    0.00
08:51:01 PM  all   71.84    0.00   21.44    0.10    0.00    0.59    5.43    0.00    0.59
08:51:06 PM  all   66.24    0.00   23.71    2.93    0.00    1.17    5.37    0.00    0.59
08:51:11 PM  all   67.97    0.00   22.66    1.95    0.00    0.68    5.27    0.00    1.46
08:51:16 PM  all   68.07    0.00   23.34    2.54    0.00    0.59    4.69    0.00    0.78
08:51:21 PM  all   55.47    0.00    8.56    2.80    0.00    0.25    1.98    0.00   30.95
08:51:26 PM  all   38.44    0.00    2.07    1.24    0.00    0.21    0.07    0.00   57.97
08:51:31 PM  all   12.65    0.00    1.85    0.87    0.00    0.40    0.00    0.00   84.23
08:51:36 PM  all    7.60    0.00    1.14   12.64    0.00    0.22    0.05    0.00   78.35
08:51:41 PM  all   10.29    0.00    0.99    0.12    0.00    0.29    0.00    0.00   88.31
08:51:46 PM  all    6.94    0.00    0.65    0.11    0.00    0.05    0.00    0.00   92.25
08:51:51 PM  all    7.05    0.00    0.86    0.43    0.00    0.11    0.05    0.00   91.49