All,
I am at a loss to explain or fix the following issue, and am having trouble coming up with the words to even describe it:
I currently have a test machine running RH7.3 (kernel upgraded to 2.4.20-28.7 via RH supplied RPM) that has some odd issues when writing to stdout. More than a few kb of output on the device causes severe slowdowns that only affect the terminal the process is running on.
Several examples I can list of the symptom include while running mail-abuse's open relay test, which tries repeatedly (in a single SMTP session) to relay mail through the box. After about 10 attempts (which take a few seconds to complete) each attempt begins taking about 30-60 seconds for the system to process.
Another example is while untarring packages containing many files. After unpacking the first few dozen files, the terminal essentially freezes (no output, CRs not displayed when I check for responsiveness.)
The odd part of all of this is that there is no real load on the system. Load averages remain beneath 0.1 at all times. Other terminals are responsive while the problem manifests itself. Anything that does not write to stdout appears to be unaffected (though pipes and redirects are.)
The hardware is fairly unremarkable. I pulled an unused workstation for use as a test machine. 1.4GHz Athlon with 256MB ram, and a single 40GB IDE disk. The disk is sliced into a small /boot partition, 512MB of swap, and the rest allocated to root. Not the best way to do things, but as I said, this is just a proof of concept machine.
Any advice would be appreciated.
I am at a loss to explain or fix the following issue, and am having trouble coming up with the words to even describe it:
I currently have a test machine running RH7.3 (kernel upgraded to 2.4.20-28.7 via RH supplied RPM) that has some odd issues when writing to stdout. More than a few kb of output on the device causes severe slowdowns that only affect the terminal the process is running on.
Several examples I can list of the symptom include while running mail-abuse's open relay test, which tries repeatedly (in a single SMTP session) to relay mail through the box. After about 10 attempts (which take a few seconds to complete) each attempt begins taking about 30-60 seconds for the system to process.
Another example is while untarring packages containing many files. After unpacking the first few dozen files, the terminal essentially freezes (no output, CRs not displayed when I check for responsiveness.)
The odd part of all of this is that there is no real load on the system. Load averages remain beneath 0.1 at all times. Other terminals are responsive while the problem manifests itself. Anything that does not write to stdout appears to be unaffected (though pipes and redirects are.)
The hardware is fairly unremarkable. I pulled an unused workstation for use as a test machine. 1.4GHz Athlon with 256MB ram, and a single 40GB IDE disk. The disk is sliced into a small /boot partition, 512MB of swap, and the rest allocated to root. Not the best way to do things, but as I said, this is just a proof of concept machine.
Any advice would be appreciated.
