Performance significantly degraded or machine becomes unresponsive because all CPUs are spinning around shrink_inactive_list

Solution In Progress - Updated -

Issue

All or almost all CPUs stuck in spinlocks around shrink_inactive_list.
Spinning processes cannot be killed with SIGTERM or SIGSTOP or SIGKILL signals. Machine is almost unresponsive or totally non-responsive due to the continuously spinning mentioned tasks. Kernel is in livelock.
Machine has very high average load.

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

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