Pods using Persistent Volumes with high file counts fail to start or take an excessive amount of time in OpenShift

Issue

• Pod deployments are failing with the following message:

  Error: Failed to create pod sandbox: rpc error: code = Unknown desc = Kubelet may be retrying requests that are timing out in CRI-O due to system load: context deadline exceeded
  

• Pods not able to start falling into CreateContainerError status:

  mypod-5-1111a           0/1     CreateContainerError   0          7m29s
  

• When attaching volumes to pods in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, why do pods sometimes not start, or otherwise take an excessive amount of time to start?
• The volumes themselves have very high file counts, measured often in tens of thousands of files and directories (or higher).
• Starting the pods without the high file count volumes allows the pod to become Ready quickly (but without access to the data the volume provides).
• It is possible that entire nodes sometimes are marked as NotReady due to this issue as the container runtime (docker or cri-o) is unresponsive (as seen with hung docker ps or crictl ps commands).
• When using Persistent Volumes with high file counts in OpenShift, why do pods fail to start or take an excessive amount of time to achieve Ready state?