[rhn-users] IOWAIT state overload

[Tim Trott]

For over a week now I have been experiencing repeated shutdown of services (RHEL 3 ES) where the IOWAIT goes to high double digits and idle goes to flat zero for long periods of time. I am running a fairly strong system with a XEON processor with 1 gig of DDR and LSI RAID, but at less than 60% user load everyhing starts freezing up and services top working (POP3, SMTP, HTTP, DNS). I have heard that others are experiencing the same thing and I was told that there was a problem with the last ES kernel, so but after updating to the current version nothing has improved. It still locks up at least once a day. Restarting services appears to clear the problem, but this is not a solution. RedHat Support's suggestions have not been useful.

Is there an answer to this problem? I need one very soon.