RE: Livelock seen on current with threaded processes

Kevin Oberman wrote:

> I run transcode on a video file to convert it to divx4 using the xvid4
> library. I do this with nice set to 10 and top confirms that it is set
> to 10. At various times, the system starts locking up. Windows won't
> refresh. Shell commands never execute (nor do keys echo) in 
> some windows
> including syscons vtys. If my gkrellm is still alive (and it usually
> is), I see the system at 97% CPU and nothing else busy. There 
> is a bit a
> disk I/O but not much.

This sounds a lot like the problems I described in the thread "Serious I/O
problems (bad performance and live-lock)" from a few weeks ago. It seems
that when the VM subsystem is put under pressure the machine comes to a
grinding halt. In my case I could trigger this with a simple 'dd' (on a
filesystem, not on a raw device).

/Daniel Eriksson