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<== Date ==> | <== Thread ==> |
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Subject: | Re: Odd problems with RHEL6 diskless machines |
From: | Andrew Johnson <[email protected]> |
To: | [email protected] |
Cc: | [email protected] |
Date: | Wed, 24 Jul 2013 10:33:15 -0500 |
Hi Tom, On 07/24/2013 09:45 AM, [email protected] wrote:
When running an IOC with just devIocStats in it, all of the scan tasks seem to pause for up to 300 seconds (about half of the pauses are between 299 and 301 seconds), then resume. During this time an existing ssh connection to the server will continue to work, but channel access monitors may time out. R3.14.8.2, R3.14.11 and R3.14.12.3 IOCs are all affected. dmesg and /var/log/messages show nothing suspicious, and cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail returns 3968.
Interesting problem...Does this have anything to do with devIocStats and the fact that you're presumably running the IOC as a real-time process? I don't know the internals of that module running on Linux, but the old VxStats module on vxWorks has a lowest-priority idle thread that every so often busy-waits for a specific period of time to measure how much work the CPU does in the higher priority threads. I could see a problem if devIocStats is trying to use the same technique on Linux because IIRC all real-time (SCHED_FIFO) threads still have a higher priority than regular threads, and this could cause the effect you're seeing. Why it only seems to affect diskless systems is still a bit of a question, but I could think up some reasons for that.
Take a look at the internals of devIocStats, and if it has such an idle task try disabling it (it should be asking the OS instead of trying to measure it anyway). Alternatively, see if not running the IOC as a real-time process stops the problem.
HTH, - Andrew -- Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it. -- Stephen Leacock