Problems with RHEL6 on Dell R810 "The canary thread is apparently starving"

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I've been having some issues for awhile with a Dell Poweredge R810 running RHEL6 that I haven't been able to solve.  This issue has been persisting since being setup and through all updates(just applied the 6.2 updates yesterday) and what I am seeing in the /var/log/messages are these lines repeating whenever the problem is occuring(server slows down to a crawl and all the VMs running on it as well)

 

Dec 7 08:52:11 gsr1 rtkit-daemon[4061]: The canary thread is apparently starving. Taking action.

Dec 7 08:52:11 gsr1 rtkit-daemon[4061]: Demoting known real-time threads.

Dec 7 08:52:11 gsr1 rtkit-daemon[4061]: Demoted 0 threads.

 

Any ideas?

Responses

Hello Wayne,

 

Can you check SAR logs to see if the CPU usage of the host system is really high during this time period

 

I would recommend to capture 'top' output during this time and analyze it to see if the CPU is getting pegged

 

top -b -d 1 -n 100 > /tmp/top.txt

Any resolution?

Hi Mike. Are you experiencing the same issue as the original poster?

I had same issue during few hour and checked log files, same log file as above. During that time one java process was showing up 690-700 % on top tool, not on ps output. Now the system is back to normal but really would like to know what was the cause.

Hello,

Could you please open a support case with us for following up on the issue system experienced. SUPPORT CASES

Hi Roy,

I had the exact same issue with some of our VMs , turned out to be the pulseaudio package that shouldn't be installed on VMs.

just remove

pulseaudio-0.9.21-26.el6.x86_64

Cheers Jonathan

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