How to find out what processes are on the Blocked list?

From: Robert Miller (rmiller@SMUD.ORG)
Date: Wed Apr 07 2004 - 18:25:40 EDT

Folks,

I have a box that's spending a whole lotta time waiting for I/O, which seems to have happened recently. Is there a way to tell which processes are causing the I/O wait?

'vmstat 2' output below:

kthr memory page faults cpu
----- ----------- ------------------------ ------------ -----------
 r b avm fre re pi po fr sr cy in sy cs us sy id wa
 2 1 92382 734 0 0 0 11 29 0 229 319 346 7 5 70 19
 0 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 391 6610 649 8 6 0 86
 2 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 423 6337 593 10 6 0 85
 0 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 214 2872 246 4 2 0 94
 2 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 166 774 140 1 0 0 99
 0 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 166 1637 141 2 0 0 97
 1 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 198 964 184 2 0 0 98
 0 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 163 723 110 2 0 0 98
 0 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 226 5539 266 8 2 0 91
 0 0 92382 733 0 0 0 0 0 0 186 2575 140 2 2 0 96

There was a backup job that I killed, finally had to kill -9 it, and then power-cycled the tape drive, and rmdev'd it back to Defined and then to Available again to see if it was the drive itself, but that didn't seem to help at all.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks...

--rm

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