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Date:      Mon, 7 Feb 2005 00:48:30 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Jon Drews <jon.drews@gmail.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: What does sbwait mean in top ?
Message-ID:  <Pine.NEB.3.96L.1050207004514.61595E-100000@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <8cb27cbf05020614334a3978cd@mail.gmail.com>

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On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Jon Drews wrote:

>  What does sbwait mean in top? Is it related to a sysctl setting? I have
> looked in the man page for top, at William LeFebvres site (
> http://www.groupsys.com/top ), in Evi Nemeth's "UNIX System
> Administration Handbook" and Googled in general.  Does anyone know of a
> URL that gives an explanation of sbwait and for that matter semwait too. 

The sbwait wchan is present when a thread has invoked the in-kernel
sbwait() function to wait for a socket event.  It's used in a number of
situations, but the main ones are:

- The thread is trying to send on a blocking socket, but there's
  insufficient socket buffer space, so it must wait for space.  This might
  occur if it has managead to max out the bandwidth available to a TCP
  connection, or flow control is in use and the receiver does not wish to
  receive more data yet.

- The thread is trying to receive on a blocking socket, but there's not
  enough data to satisfy the read request, so it must wait for data to be
  received.  It might be waiting for a remote TCP sender to have data
  available, or for in-flight data to arrive.

Robert N M Watson



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