With a lot of offline hand holding from relling (much appreciated!!) heres a few observations:
[background: 12GB RAM and 50GB swap] lotsfree 4G desfree 2G throttlefree 1G minfree 50M -> The initial thought was that system clogs up when we drop down below minfree desperately trying to pagescan and free up memory. -> Turns out thats not true. The freezing happens around the time we drop below desfree. IOBar shows large sets of writes take place around the same time. So theres a correlation between large sets of writes and temporary freeze (freeze defined as keyboard not responding not even caps lock lights toggling) -> set zfs:zfs_vdev_max_pending = 1 solves the problem almost magically now there are no freezes at all. I dont have an explanation for this. Why would keyboard/mouse freeze because reads are stuck behind large bulk of writes. Unless some driver disables interrupts raises interrupt levels very high. At any rate reducing max_pending seemed to have solved a few other starvation problems I had. banks -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ perf-discuss mailing list perf-discuss@opensolaris.org
