System comes to a halt on heavy disk I/O

[Charles Curley]

On Mon, 1 Feb 2010 13:04:57 -0700
Charles Curley <charlescurley at charlescurley.com> wrote:

> On Mon, 01 Feb 2010 09:51:55 -0700
> Kenneth Burgener <kenneth at mail1.ttak.org> wrote:
> 

> 
> So far I've been testing by writing to sdb. I think a similar test to
> send data to sda is next. If I can't swamp the system with that, that
> will suggest that sbd is the problem.

Hmmm. To clear out some space for testing on sda, I copied a 12G file
from sda to sdb, in 2m54s, or about 68 MB/sec one way.

I also noticed a major difference in the vmstat output. Both the blocks
in and blocks out showed much larger numbers. Rarely did the wait times
go above 20%, and I don't think I saw it go over 30%.

I'm now diffing them, and seeing wait times in the low 30% range, and
lots of blocks in. The diff took 2m51.849s to read 24 G.



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