:
:On chlamydia I have many processes stuck in "hmrrcm", making the system
:unusable - can't open new shells, etc. After a minute or two the
:situation seems to improve again.
This is an inode moderation mechanic which will typically occur if
large numbers (thousands) of inodes have been dirtied and need to
be updated on-media. It prevents hammer's inode structure allocations
from blowing away kernel memory and crashing the system.
A rm -rf or a tar extract is the most typical culprit but atime
updates can create issues as well if large portions of the filesystem
are being randomly read. You can try mounting noatime to address
atime issues.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@backplane.com>