From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Mar 30 18:40:36 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from utility.clubscholarship.com (utility.clubscholarship.com [198.78.70.175]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9E9DD37B416 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 18:40:31 -0800 (PST) Received: from localhost (root@localhost) by utility.clubscholarship.com (8.11.6/8.11.6) with ESMTP id g2V2dKT99281 for ; Sat, 30 Mar 2002 18:39:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from root@utility.clubscholarship.com) Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 18:39:20 -0800 (PST) From: Patrick Thomas To: Subject: 'b' processes in vmstat climbs steadily over time... Message-ID: <20020330183519.Y99100-100000@utility.clubscholarship.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hello, I am running two fairly "classic" multi-user systems - one on 4.4-RELEASE and one on 4.5-RELEASE. The number of processes on each machine has been fairly consistent over the last month or so - about 250 processes on each machine. I am _very_ alarmed that every day, another one or two processes gets added to the 'b' column in `vmstat` output: r b w avm fre flt re pi po fr sr aa0 md0 in sy cs us sy id ... (first line irrelevant) 3 17 0 270948 174504 13 0 0 0 13 0 0 0 289 96 22 0 5 95 As you can see there are now 17 processes being "blocked for resources". This number will continue to climb ... usually I reboot the system when it gets above 20. I don't see or feel any negative performance on the machine, but my previous training in solaris told me that a lot of processes blocked for resources is _bad bad bad_. So what gives ? How come even though the usage of the machine is steady, the number of blocked processes rises and rises the longer the machine runs ? A related question: how can I tell which processes are the culprits ? thanks! To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message