Modern systems are complicated beasts with lots of interdependent activities between threads, programs and kernels. Figuring out some problems is nearly impossible without building some time machine and crystal ball mix that tells exactly what happened.
Did your cgroups CPU limit inject a sleep in the middle of mmap_sem acquisition by ‘ps’? Is everyone waiting for a mutex that is held by someone who is waiting for a DNS response? Did you forget to lock in your libnss.* libraries into memory and hence ended up stalling in unexpected place under memory pressure?
domas mituzas 