Nigel Metheringham wrote: > What filesystem are you using?
It's ext3.
> If it is a journaling filesystem, and the journal had filled right up
> and was being flushed to a busy disk subsystem there is a chance
> that all writes could hang.
I think you got it.
Watching the cache statistics of the RAID controler, I can see that the
hangs in the logging appear when the write hits drop down to about 20%
to 30%. It then goes up to about 70% to 90%, and logging/work continues.
Data throughput is not very high at these moments (about 8MByte/s each
read and write to the controler) but all the small files and empty
directories may sure cause a lot of head seeks on the underlying disks.