On Wed, 11 Apr 2012, m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote: > Been seeing that on 6.2, also, though I've not noticed them locking up > (the ones that have were in a cluster, and someone could have hosed > memory). It got less with the latest kernel, but I'm still seeing them > occasionally. This is most likely a problem due to data arriving too quickly for the VM subsystem to flush dirty pages to disk to keep up; the kernel switches to synchronous mode when the dirty_ratio percentage of memory pages is used. You might try upping your dirty_ratio, or reducing it drastically. Steve