On Thu, Nov 02, 2000 at 08:19:06AM +0100, Mike Galbraith wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> > I have one possible reason for this ....
> >
> > 1) the procfs process does (in fs/proc/array.c::proc_pid_stat)
> > down(&mm->mmap_sem);
> >
> > 2) but, in order to do that, it has to wait until the process
> > it is trying to stat has /finished/ its page fault, and is
> > not into its next one ...
> >
> > 3) combine this with the elevator starvation stuff (ask Jens
> > Axboe for blk-7 to alleviate this issue) and you have a
> > scenario where processes using /proc/<pid>/stat have the
> > possibility to block on multiple processes that are in the
> > process of handling a page fault (but are being starved)
>
> I'm experimenting with blk.[67] in test10 right now. The stalls
> are not helped at all. It doesn't seem to become request bound
> (haven't instrumented that yet to be sure) but the stalls persist.
>
> -Mike
This is not an elevator starvation problem.
I also experienced these stalls with my IDE-only system. Unless I'm
badly mistaken, the elevator is only used on SCSI disks, therefore
elevator starvation cannot be blamed for this problem. These stalls
are particularly annoying since I want to find the pid of the process
hogging memory in order to kill it, but the read from /proc stalls for
45 seconds or more.
-VAL
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