Host11 went under heavy disk I/O, and is unresponsive to commands. I'm preparing to reboot it.

-Chris

Thanks for the info

I'm unable to boot my linode (66.220.1.83).

the hub is in reboot!

It seems to be booting now.

Should be all set.

This was due to the crappy I/O scheduler in 2.4 kernels, which essentially DoS the box if one (or more) processes (like a UML kernel) decides to consume all the disk bandwidth.

I've been testing 2.6 kernels, so I thought we'd give it a shot:

[root@host11 vm]# uname -a
Linux host11.linode.com 2.6.3-1 #1 SMP Wed Feb 18 10:18:43 EST 2004 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

-Chris

Down again?

That didn't go well. Box froze (probably bugged/panic'ed) after a few minutes... Rebooting back into 2.4, should only be a moment.

-Chris

I think that I/O scheduling is the single most important performance factor for Linodes, and that it should be a very high priority to get this problem solved.

As it stands, Linodes can easily hog all of the I/O bandwidth and the result is that everyone suffers quite badly. host5 seems to be experiencing bad I/O load a couple of times day; this might be recent as I just started tracking it, but I have seen about half a dozen occurrances per day of the load on my Linode going up to 3, 4, 5, or even 12 (!!!) for a few minues at a time. My Linode is unloaded so this is most likely due to some other Linode hammering the disk and processes in my Linode having to wait a long time for small disk requests (either paging in memory or touching the filesystem).

If the 2.6 kernel really does have a way to more fairly distribute the I/O load (so that no one Linode can totally hog all of the I/O), then I am so all for it!