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From: Mike Harding <mvh@ix.netcom.com>
To: stable@freebsd.org
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Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 10:19:41 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: system slowdown - vnode related
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I woke up to a frozen box this morning - it froze up a few more times
before I got a handle on it.

Basically, the box runs idle but refuses to do disk IO, or does it
-very- slowly.

Top shows processes stuck in 'ffsvget', 'inode', and 'vlruwk' state.

I can get the box responsive again by setting sysctl
kern.maxvnods=100000.  It starts up with kern.maxnodes=36079.  I don't
know yet if this is a 'fix' - I wanted to send this mail out before
the box froze again.

I can reliably get the box in to this state by doing 'find /'.  I do
have a lot of files on the disk, and a things like squid and postgres
that do a lot of file i/o, but I don't recall this happening before
this week.  I don't find anything in 'tuning' about bumping up vnodes,
but I do see sporadic reports on a google group search - searching for
'ffsvgt'.

Anybody run into this before?

- Mike H.