We are running openSUSE 13.1 on a big server (2*10 Core XEON, 128GB). Every once in a while, the kernel processes (kworker, kswapd etc.) start to generate a significant amount of load on this system. The load becomes so high, that even bash response is slow.
The issue goes away as soon as the system is rebootet.
Neither dmesg nor /var/log/messages show something suspicious.
Kernel: Linux [HOSTNAME] 3.11.10-21-default #1 SMP Mon Jul 21 15:28:46 UTC 2014 (9a9565d) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
On 2014-11-07 16:46, jg wrote:
>
> We are running openSUSE 13.1 on a big server (2*10 Core XEON, 128GB).
> Every once in a while, the kernel processes (kworker, kswapd etc.) start
> to generate a significant amount of load on this system. The load
> becomes so high, that even bash response is slow.
> The issue goes away as soon as the system is rebootet.
Does that server need to write a constant flow of data? If yes, I
remember a similar issue. IIRC, the filesystem metadata was cached in
memory instead of writing, till the kernel finally decided to flush it
all. Being a lot of data to be written, it took its time about it.
If this is the case, a flush of the cache cures it. At least, it is
faster than a reboot.
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
:-?
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 13.1 x86_64 “Bottle” at Telcontar)