On several servers running 4.7.x and 4.8-rc6/7 kernels I'm seeing
thousands of kworker processes.
# ps auxf|grep -c kworker
2104
Load average goes into hundreds on a pretty much idle server (biggest
CPU and RAM consumers are probably SSHD with one user logged in and
rsyslog writing ~1 line per minute):
# uptime
06:58:56 up 26 min, 1 user, load average: 146.11, 215.46, 105.70
# uptime
06:59:48 up 26 min, 1 user, load average: 305.20, 240.84, 120.25
Sometimes seeing lots of them in "D" state:
root 19474 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:208]
root 19475 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:209]
root 19477 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:211]
root 19480 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:214]
root 19483 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:217]
root 19485 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:219]
root 19486 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:220]
root 19487 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:221]
root 19492 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/0:226]
root 19533 0.0 0.0 0 0 ? D 06:54 0:00 \_
[kworker/4:257]
Is it a known issue?
The server has 8 CPUs and 32 GB RAM.
Tomasz Chmielewski
https://lxadm.com
