pdflush hanging on Amazon EBS drives when using multi-GB files - any workaround?

Posted by rhh on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by rhh
Published on 2010-12-21T18:30:36Z Indexed on 2010/12/21 18:55 UTC
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linux

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aws

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ebs

Hello,

When I run gunzip on a 1.7GB file (which generates an 8GB file) on an EBS volume, pdflush freezes after gunzip runs and the CPU hangs indefinitely at 100% IO Wait. Here's the output from 'ps aux | grep pdflush'. Note the D status

root 87 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:18 0:00 pdflush root 88 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:18 0:00 pdflush

The only solution is to kill the pdflush processes. The processes don't die immediately either.

This problem is repeatable and happens with new instances. I'm running 2xlarge instances and I have way more RAM free than is being used (i.e. /proc/meminfo shows 20+GB MemFree)

Has anyone found a workaround to this problem in the past?

Thanks for any thoughts.

Robert

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