On Thu, 15 Jan 2004 10:44:52 -0800, Matt Raines wrote:

> Last night we had a problem on our p660-6H1 where one of the disks in
> our mirrored pair of internal scsi disks went to 100% busy and but
> iostat did not show any reads or writes. As a result the server was
> unusable until we rebooted it which did in fact fix the problem. This
> particular server is 4.3.3 and has 6 cpus and 8 gbs of ram running
> oracle 8i.
>
> Anyone else seen anything similar to this before on any scsi based
> system?

An operation (such as ls) on a directory with hundreds of thousands of
files in it will make the disk go to 100% with no visible I/O. But IME it
doesn't make the machine unusable. Maybe it does if it's in a system FS.

Look for filesystems with abnormally high inodes used.

Regards, Ian