Use of /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches in RHEL 4 can cause a deadlock or high system load / system hang
Issue
- A deadlock can occur between kjournald and drop_pagecache.
- After I operated "echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches" on the system which uses a ext3 filesystem, I experienced a deadlock.
- High system load and or hang occurs and many threads seen in system calls related to filesystems or IO stuck waiting for a spin_lock
Environment
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4
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