Questions[kjournald](server)

The kjournald process starts sometimes on my Debian web server.

When I run top, the kjournald process eats up 100% of the CPU utilization.

After an hour that the process runs, my web server (apache) does not respond anything to requests (my site is down), but I can access SSH via putty (very slow though).

When I show uptime, I get this:

debian:/home/jonathan# uptime
 08:11:56 up 15:14,  1 user,  load average: 101.06, 50.67, 30.41

This happens like once a week or so. When this happens, I must reboot to take my server up to its normal state. When I input reboot command, the server just dont reboot and I don't know why. I must hard reboot with the front button, like in the "Windows 95" days!

I was running top on my server and noticed kjournald seemed (to me) to have a high cpu time. My server has been up for ~21 days and I have never noticed triple-digit minutes usage of kjournald before.

Is this normal of Ubuntu 8.04 or do I need to worry about something going wrong on my system?

I'm trying to figure out why is kjournald going crazy on my machine. It's an 8-core box with loads of memory. It's got ~50% cpu load.

The iotop doesn't seem to point at any specific processes - some bursts of writes here and there (mostly cron starting, some monitoring stats generated, etc.) When I used sys/vm/block_dump to gather the write statistics, I got lists like this:

kjournald(1352): 1909
sendmail(28934): 13
cron(28910): 12
cron(28912): 11
munin-node(29015): 3
cron(28913): 3
check_asterisk_(28917): 3
sh(28917): 2
munin-node(29022): 2
munin-node(29021): 2

Where kjournald actions are just WRITEs.

Why is that happening? What else should I look at to limit the kjournald activity a bit? It seems disproportionate to what's actually being written.