uninterruptible sleep

[Dirk Moolman]

I am trying to troubleshoot one of my linux servers that is very slow
lately.  One thing that I worry about, is the column b (uninterruptible
sleep) of the vmstat output, that runs up to values of about 35.  But I
do not know how to troubleshoot this any further.  Searching for more
info about uninterruptible sleep on the web, I came across this post
(see bottom of mail).    

But from what I have learnt about this column (b), there could be many
reason for processes being in this state.   How would I identify the
cause of this ?

Hope you can help.



POST:

"I have a problem with what I believe might be related to the aic79xx
driver.
I'm running 2.4.33.3 kernel with default aic79xx driver version 1.3.10"

[snip]

" The machine is a mail server that was recently migrated to the new
hardware
and now the load average is constantly between 10 and 20 and sometimes
climbs higher. top and vmstat shows lots of processes in uninterruptible

sleep, which as far I understand means that the processes wait while the
driver code to complete"


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