Why did kswapd use about 100% system cpu and processes are in stale state?
Issue
- Why did kswapd use about 100% system cpu and processes are in stale state on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5?
- kswapd is eating CPU resources. Load of the system is very high. Processes became stuck in D state and any collection on data on the machine is not easy (ps not working). The difference is that the kernel is newer than the recommended. It happened on both nodes already. We have been able to collect vmcore from the affected machine.
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
451 root 20 -5 0 0 0 R 99.9 0.0 533:04.67 kswapd0
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 and earlier versions
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