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