yum causes I/O slowness and excessive load and causes other processes to be stuck on I/O

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

We are experiencing low I/O (disk) performance on "reverse proxy" systems.
The system is a RHEL 5.9 running in a Xen VM and no other VMs are runing on the same physical server.
When yum is rebuilding its cache:
- the reverse proxy is slow in servicing I/O requests to disk (mainly logging from apache)
- yum is slow as well: it shows high iowait and service time in iostat

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5
  • ext3 filsystems

Subscriber exclusive content

A Red Hat subscription provides unlimited access to our knowledgebase, tools, and much more.

Current Customers and Partners

Log in for full access

Log In

New to Red Hat?

Learn more about Red Hat subscriptions

Using a Red Hat product through a public cloud?

How to access this content