Date: Sat, 30 Mar 2002 18:39:20 -0800 (PST) From: Patrick Thomas <root@utility.clubscholarship.com> To: <questions@freebsd.org> Subject: 'b' processes in vmstat climbs steadily over time... Message-ID: <20020330183519.Y99100-100000@utility.clubscholarship.com>
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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
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