Current-Users archive   Re: Strange behaviour on 4.99.53  On
Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Paul Goyette wrote:  I've actually been seeing
this for a while - at least since 4.99.39 ...  Occassionally it
seems that disk I/O activity just stalls. currently I've got a
dump(8) running on the filesystem that contains /usr/src and
/usr/obj . The dump has been running for more than 5 hours now,
and it making extremely slow progress. Sometimes the dump takes
9 or 10 hours before it finishes! The hard drive activity light
blinks about once a second - it should be on solid, since the
machine is doing nothing else.  The dump is running under
control of /usr/pkg/sysutils/amanda but I don't think amanda has
anything to do with the problem. The dump command is being piped
to gzip(1) and the gzip output is directed to a network socket
(amanda's 'dumper' is on the other end of the socket and writing
things to a disk file on a different physical drive).  I've seen
similar "stalls" when gzip is trying to uncompress a file
located on an NFS-