Problem with Sun machines hanging

[Colleen Hayase]

This is probably a Solaris problem but I thought I'd throw it out to the
AFS community in case it  rings a bell...

We have several Sun machines running either Solaris 2.5.1 or 2.7 that hang
occasionally when you run "top" or "ps -ef" even though the load average is
low (< 0.5) and lots of memory is available. After running "ps -ef" the
process that's listed after the hang is the offending process. Killing the
process often frees up resources and the system is back to normal. Also,
once you find the "bad" process running "ls /proc/<PID>" will also hang.

I've also posted to the comp.unix.solaris newsgroup and a frequent comment
was that there's a problem with an NFS mounted server. Our machines don't
have any NFS mounted servers. The only thing that comes close is our
AFS-mounted cell.

I don't have detailed statistics but most, if not all, the problem
processes are applications running/writing from/to directories in AFS. If
anyone has ideas I'd surely like to try them out. Thanks.

Colleen Hayase, EDA LAN Support
IBM East Fishkill, Bldg 334 2L14-423
hayase@us.ibm.com
(t/l) 533-8976, 845-894-8976