Bug#686847: KVM guest slows down and finally hangs on I/O
Package: linux-2.6
Version: 2.6.32-45
Severity: normal
Linux vmXXXX.cs16.seeweb.it 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:00:17 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux
This is a fully up to date squeeze system running as a guest on a RHEL
6.2 host. 1 CPU, 1 GB of RAM, virtio net and disk (using XFS).
We have hundreds of similar guests but only this one shows this problem.
The system suddenly slows down and then all processes hang. The getty on
the virtual console is responsive to input, but it hangs when it tries
to fork+exec login.
The workload is unmemorable, apparently mostly light apache/PHP.
The kernel logs this same stack trace for all (?) processes:
Bug#686847: KVM guest slows down and finally hangs on I/O
On Sep 06, Marco d'Itri <md@linux.it> wrote:
> The system suddenly slows down and then all processes hang. The getty on
> the virtual console is responsive to input, but it hangs when it tries
> to fork+exec login.
After installing the backported wheezy kernel I have found out that this
is related to VM pressure: now the system is trashing hard but is
responsive and does not freezes, and the OOM killer started killing
some processes.