uninterruptible sleep

[Alma J Wetzker]

Dirk Moolman wrote:
> 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"

I am a bit on the paranoid side, but, could you have been hacked?

    -- alma