RHEL5: System unresponsive under low memory conditions and default setting of max_reclaims_in_progress

Solution Verified - Updated -

Issue

  • System becomes unresponsive under low memory conditions with the following stack traces:

    #3 [ffff810a6c823990] .text.lock.spinlock at ffffffff80064ccf (via _spin_lock_irq)
#4 [ffff810a6c823990] shrink_inactive_list at ffffffff800c7933
#5 [ffff810a6c823b80] shrink_zone at ffffffff80012d02
#6 [ffff810a6c823bc0] try_to_free_pages at ffffffff800c80ac
#7 [ffff810a6c823c40] __alloc_pages at ffffffff8000f271
  • What is the vm.max_reclaims_in_progress parameter?

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5
  • default value (0) for vm.max_reclaims_in_progress
  • workload which causes low memory conditions

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