The nsd nodes were running 5.0.1-2 (though we just now rolling to 5.0.2-1 I 
think).

So is this memory pressure on the NSD nodes then? I thought it was documented 
somewhere that GFPS won’t use more than 50% of the host memory.

And actually if you look at the values for maxStatCache and maxFilesToCache, 
the memory footprint is quite small.

Sure on these NSD servers we had a pretty big pagepool (which we’ve dropped by 
some), but there still should have been quite a lot of memory space on the 
nodes …

If only someone as going to do a talk in December at the CIUK SSUG on memory 
usage …

Simon

From: <gpfsug-discuss-boun...@spectrumscale.org> on behalf of 
"oeh...@gmail.com" <oeh...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: "gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>
Date: Tuesday, 27 November 2018 at 18:19
To: "gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Hanging file-systems

Hi,

now i need to swap back in a lot of information about GPFS i tried to swap out 
:-)

i bet kswapd is not doing anything you think the name suggest here, which is 
handling swap space.  i claim the kswapd thread is trying to throw dentries out 
of the cache and what it tries to actually get rid of are entries of 
directories very high up in the tree which GPFS still has a refcount on so it 
can't free it. when it does this there is a single thread (unfortunate was 
never implemented with multiple threads) walking down the tree to find some 
entries to steal, it it can't find any it goes to the next , next , etc and on 
a bus system it can take forever to free anything up. there have been multiple 
fixes in this area in 5.0.1.x and 5.0.2 which i pushed for the weeks before i 
left IBM. you never see this in a trace with default traces which is why nobody 
would have ever suspected this, you need to set special trace levels to even 
see this.
i don't know the exact version the changes went into, but somewhere in the 
5.0.1.X timeframe. the change was separating the cache list to prefer stealing 
files before directories, also keep a minimum percentages of directories in the 
cache (10 % by default) before it would ever try to get rid of a directory. it 
also tries to keep a list of free entries all the time (means pro active 
cleaning them) and also allows to go over the hard limit compared to just block 
as in previous versions. so i assume you run a version prior to 5.0.1.x and 
what you see is kspwapd desperately get rid of entries, but can't find one its 
already at the limit so it blocks and doesn't allow a new entry to be created 
or promoted from the statcache .

again all this is without source code access and speculation on my part based 
on experience :-)

what version are you running and also share mmdiag --stats of that node

sven






On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 9:54 AM Simon Thompson 
<s.j.thomp...@bham.ac.uk<mailto:s.j.thomp...@bham.ac.uk>> wrote:
Thanks Sven …

We found a node with kswapd running 100% (and swap was off)…

Killing that node made access to the FS spring into life.

Simon

From: 
<gpfsug-discuss-boun...@spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss-boun...@spectrumscale.org>>
 on behalf of "oeh...@gmail.com<mailto:oeh...@gmail.com>" 
<oeh...@gmail.com<mailto:oeh...@gmail.com>>
Reply-To: 
"gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>" 
<gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>>
Date: Tuesday, 27 November 2018 at 16:14
To: "gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>" 
<gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org<mailto:gpfsug-discuss@spectrumscale.org>>
Subject: Re: [gpfsug-discuss] Hanging file-systems

1. are you under memory pressure or even worse started swapping .
_______________________________________________
gpfsug-discuss mailing list
gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org<http://spectrumscale.org>
http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss
_______________________________________________
gpfsug-discuss mailing list
gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org
http://gpfsug.org/mailman/listinfo/gpfsug-discuss

Reply via email to