> There has always been something that has felt wrong for me with regards to
> how Linux blocks processes when something is being written to disk...I'm
> going to attempt to describe it with an example I just saw of it on our
> mail server.
Hi Simon,
You can see the same behavior with pine. With a largish mailbox, it
will start syncing and take several seconds to sync a 5mb file (way too
long even given lousy disks). I traced one of these events from start
to finish, and could only see what you described.. nothing but nothing
is going on except disk io and page faults until the sync is finished.
It seems to happen when you try to read at the same time sync happens
in the pine case. The reader blocks, and the box starts thrashing like
crazy.
-Mike
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