From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: "Lelsie Rhorer" Subject: RE: RAID halting Date: Sat, 4 Apr 2009 10:15:55 -0500 Message-ID: <20090404151557.VWAG19140.cdptpa-omta03.mail.rr.com@Leslie> References: <1238857457.16200.64.camel@cichlid.com> Reply-To: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <1238857457.16200.64.camel@cichlid.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: 'Linux RAID' List-Id: linux-raid.ids > Oprofile is supposed to be good for user and kernel profiling but I > don't know if it can find non-cpu bound stuff. There are also a bunch of > latency analysis tools in the kernel that were used for realtime tuning, > they might show where something is getting stuck. Andrew Morton did alot > of work in this area. Do you know if he subscribes to this list? If not, how may I reach him? > If the cpu was spinning somewhere it would show as system time so it > must be waiting for a timer or some other event (wild guessing). It's as > if the i/o completion never arrives but some timer eventually goes off > and maybe the i/o is retried and everything gets back on track? But that > should cause utilization to go up and you'd think some sort of > message... It's also puzzling why the issue is so much worse when the array diagnostic is running. Almost every file creation triggers a halt, and the halt time extends to 2 minutes. This is one thing which makes me tend to think it is an interaction between the file system and the RAID system, rather than either one alone. > Perhaps the ide list would know of some diagnostic knobs to tweak. > One last thing, the cpu goes toward 100% idle not wait? Neither one. If the drive access is tied to a local CPU intensive user application, for example ffmpeg, then of course CPU utilization dips, but if all the drive accesses are via network utilities (ftp, SAMBA, etc), I haven't noticed any change in CPU utilization. Simultaneous reads and writes to other local drives or network drives continue without a hiccough.