Why did kswapd use about 100% system cpu and processes are in stale state?

Solution Verified - Updated -

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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