Re: processes in D state too long too often

["Gary L. Grobe" <gary@grobe.net>]

>>The more likely explanation is that you just switched to a more recent
>>distro where "sync" (as opposed to "async") is the option.  Depending on
>>workload, "async" may improve performance a great deal, at the expense
>>of possible data corruption on server reboot!
>>
>>If you're doing a lot of writing and using NFSv2, then switching to
>>NFSv3 may give you performance close to the "async" performance without
>>the corruption worries.

Just a small update about our rollback I need to correct. Turns out our problem has been solved by going with the 2.6.20-r10 of the gentoo-sources patched kernel. Although gentoo marks this as unstable for amd64, it's working fine. I've made no other changes than going back a few versions on the kernel and adjusting the .config w/ the same settings. 

Tomorrow I'll likely give the next marked stable patched gentoo-sources kernel another try which was 2.6.24-r10 and recheck my configs and try to gather anything else I can gather from it.