Blocked process

[Robert Watson]

On Sat, 22 Aug 2009, Daniel O'Connor wrote:

> On Fri, 21 Aug 2009, CmdLnKid wrote:
>> came back or the machine was rebooted. I continued for a while using 
>> /var/mail over NFS while setting or unset mail variables for the shell. You 
>> may also want to check into whether something is trying to acquire a lock 
>> on a file over that NFS mount which could accrue some extra time making it 
>> seem like a process is hung.
>
> We don't have any NFS mounts so I don't think that's it :(

Hi Daniel--

A number of issues were corrected over the course of the 6.x life span 
involving scheduing, including some relating to "lost wakeups".  Many bug 
fixes relating to threading were also introduced (not sure if that's relevant 
to your workload).  While it's never a particularly fun recommendation, I 
think I'd suggest sliding forward to the most recent 6.x kernel (but otherwise 
identical configuration), perhaps sticking with your current userspace, and 
seeing if that resolves the issue.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge