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Daemon or Thread with 5 minute interval

linux-lvm Howard Rifkin 3 participants 5 messages May 26, 2005

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I have been working on a project that analyzes "noise" in Linux clusters running large parallel jobs. Where noise is caused by daemons or kernel threads periodically waking up and slowing down a process of a parallel job enough so that is misses a rendezvous with the other processes and so slows down the entire job. Using an internal tool I have been able to track down several daemons that have been a large source of noise but, after turning them all off I am left with a large noise spike that occurs every 5 minutes. I have tried turning off most of the most common daemons such as cron, ntp, syslog, ect. but, I am still left with this spike. Not being a kernel expert myself I have not been able to experiment with kernel threads. So, my question is does anyone know of a kernel thread or daemon in the 2.4 kernel that wakes up every 5 minutes?

Thanks

Howard

#1 lore raw

Hi

Can you find the new process's name by getting the ps ax command or Stop the crond and see what happens

Regards
John

----- Original Message -----
From: "Howard Rifkin" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Thursday, May 26, 2005 5:20 PM
Subject: [linux-lvm] Daemon or Thread with 5 minute interval

Quoted 23 lines

I have been working on a project that analyzes "noise" in Linux clusters running large parallel jobs. Where noise is caused by daemons or kernel threads periodically waking up and slowing down a process of a parallel job enough so that is misses a rendezvous with the other processes and so slows down the entire job. Using an internal tool I have been able to track down several daemons that have been a large source of noise but, after turning them all off I am left with a large noise spike that occurs every 5 minutes. I have tried turning off most of the most common daemons such as cron, ntp, syslog, ect. but, I am still left with this spike. Not being a kernel expert myself I have not been able to experiment with kernel threads. So, my question is does anyone know of a kernel thread or daemon in the 2.4 kernel that wakes up every 5 minutes?

Thanks

Howard

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#2 lore raw
In reply to Howard Rifkin
Quoted 2 lines · Howard Rifkin

So, my question is does anyone know of a
kernel thread or daemon in the 2.4 kernel that wakes up every 5 minutes?

[kupdated] can cause massive CPU load if your kernel does not have the IDE chipset support for your system. I think it flushed any data in the HD buffers to disk and if the chipset support isn't there, then the main CPU has
to do this using PIO.

--
Bill

#3 lore raw

We do have the right kernel support for our didsks. But, you do not need a lot of CPU activity to generate noise. Just enough to disrupt the cashe. Does kupdated run every 5 minutes? If so it could still be the culprit.

Thanks

Howard

Quoted 18 lines · Bill Mair
Quoted 2 lines · Howard Rifkin

So, my question is does anyone know of a
kernel thread or daemon in the 2.4 kernel that wakes up every 5 minutes?

[kupdated] can cause massive CPU load if your kernel does not have the IDE chipset support for your system. I think it flushed any data in the HD buffers to disk and if the chipset support isn't there, then the main CPU has
to do this using PIO.

Signature · 7 lines
Bill

_______________________________________________
linux-lvm mailing list
[email protected]
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm
read the LVM HOW-TO at http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/
#4 lore raw
Quoted 2 lines · Howard Rifkin

We do have the right kernel support for our didsks. But, you do not need a lot of CPU activity to generate noise. Just enough to disrupt the cashe. Does kupdated run every 5 minutes? If so it could still be the culprit.

kupdated - journal update
kswapd - swapper
bdflush - flush IO

All/any of them could cause problems fir what you are doing, but I don't think LVM is your problem.

--
Bill