I have a server that's running CentOS 5, and it will periodically (a couple of times a day) have enormous spikes in load, and the whole server will grind to a halt. After a couple of minutes, the load will go back down and everything returns to normal.
I suspect it has something to do with I/O and maybe a bad disk, but as the disks use hardware RAID, I'm not sure how to find out what's going wrong (smartctl just says "Device does not support SMART").
So anyway, what I see from top is:
top - 08:51:03 up 73 days, 7:45, 1 user, load average: 69.00, 58.31, 46.89
Tasks: 316 total, 2 running, 314 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 11.0%us, 1.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 15.2%id, 72.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.5%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8299364k total, 7998520k used, 300844k free, 15480k buffers
Swap: 16779884k total, 4788k used, 16775096k free, 6547860k cached
As you can see, the load is ridiculously high. And vmstat shows:
procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system-- -----cpu------
r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy id wa st
24 16 5632 296080 23392 6317688 0 0 3 28 0 0 7 1 89 3 0
0 22 5632 292644 23600 6325372 0 0 69 18781 1985 2318 9 2 14 75 0
1 23 5656 299472 23756 6299140 0 0 44 18667 2075 3382 14 2 13 71 0
0 23 5656 304756 24152 6295696 0 0 88 17002 1880 1445 4 1 16 78 0
0 24 5656 296736 24488 6356564 0 0 60 17967 1841 990 2 1 20 76 0
0 21 5672 302248 24764 6388424 0 0 66 17216 1820 749 2 1 24 73 0
It's the really high "wa" value that looks way off to me. Also, iotop gives:
Total DISK READ: 77.37 K/s | Total DISK WRITE: 15.81 M/s
TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND
25647 be/4 apache 73.50 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 99.99 % httpd
24387 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
23813 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
25094 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 96.72 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
25093 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
25095 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
25091 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
24389 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
24563 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % [pdflush]
24390 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 23.21 K/s 96.71 % 99.99 % httpd
24148 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 96.71 % 99.99 % httpd
24699 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % httpd
23973 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % httpd
24270 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 99.99 % httpd
24298 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 1918.82 K/s 96.71 % 99.02 % httpd
628 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 97.51 % [kjournald]
25092 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 96.72 % [pdflush]
24258 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.99 % 96.71 % [pdflush]
23814 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 96.71 % [pdflush]
24388 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 99.02 % 96.71 % [pdflush]
25545 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.19 % 92.73 % httpd
25274 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 92.38 % httpd
24801 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 5.84 M/s 99.99 % 91.63 % httpd
25281 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 5.75 M/s 0.00 % 91.33 % httpd
26115 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 9.60 % 19.26 % httpd
25561 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 3.87 K/s 0.00 % 9.66 % httpd
26035 be/4 apache 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 9.63 % httpd
Finally, I get the following from sar -d 5 0:
Linux 2.6.18-308.1.1.el5PAE (ausbt.com.au) 23/08/12
08:55:45 DEV tps rd_sec/s wr_sec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
08:55:50 dev8-0 877.25 103.79 29306.19 33.53 158.81 179.28 1.14 99.84
08:55:50 dev8-1 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
08:55:50 dev8-2 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
08:55:50 dev8-3 877.25 103.79 29306.19 33.53 158.81 179.28 1.14 99.84
This has only recently stated happening (at least, I only noticed it recently) and nothing on the server has changed, so that's why I'm suspecting maybe some kind of hardware failure, but I'm not sure where to begin looking.
Update
Thanks to Mark Wagner's hint, I did an strace of one of the processes that was doing MB/s of I/O and discovered that it was writing to files called "/tmp/magick-XXXXXXX". Here's the output of `ls -l /tmp/magick-XX*":
-rw------- 1 apache apache 1854881318400 Aug 20 04:26 /tmp/magick-XXrQahSe
-rw------- 1 apache apache 1854881318400 Aug 20 04:26 /tmp/magick-XXTaXatz
-rw------- 1 apache apache 1854881318400 Aug 20 04:26 /tmp/magick-XXtf25pe
Wow! Those files were from a couple of days ago, but there's also files from today that are a similar size. My code dynamically generates thumbnails of images using ImageMagick so perhaps there's a corrupted image somewhere that's causing ImageMagick to freak out and write 1.6 terrabyte files to /tmp.
I'll do some more poking around and post an update when I find more. Thanks everybody for the hints so far.
Comment converted to answer.
Apache PIDs 24801 and 25281 are doing by far the most I/O: 5.84 M/s and 5.75 M/s, respectively. I use
iotop -oto exclude processes not doing I/O.I'm not sure if you can trust iotop since you aren't at a kernel level it's compatible with.
I'm on the same kernel (2.6.18) as you and I can't get iotop -o to even work.. it doesn't show me only IO producing processes.