* Timo Sirainen <t...@iki.fi>: > On Thu, 2011-04-07 at 16:33 +0200, Kádár Tamás (KTamas) wrote: > > > However once in a while, someone goes rogue, we > > install a new version of thunderbird, someone accidentally sets up an > > email account in thunderbird mistakingly leaving the download > > everything option on. This causes high IO on our server, and a single > > user can quickly more or less kill the whole server in mere minutes, > > load average quickly spiking to 30-40-50 and everything becomes > > sloooooow (obviously). > > So a single process that is reading files fast enough from disk can > cause disk IO to spike in a way that makes all other processes wait for > available disk IO? I don't think that's a common problem. Typically only > that one process would be waiting for disk IO and the load would > increase by 1 (or maybe a little bit more, but definitely not by 50).. > Maybe you should look into Linux I/O schedulers and see if you're using > the wrong one.
Sounds like a filesystem problem or a scheduler issue, yes.
