- Timo Sirainen <tss@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.