This request was previously evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for inclusion in the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release, but Red Hat was unable to resolve it in time. This request will be reviewed for a future Red Hat Enterprise Linux release.
Corey, would you be willing to take a look and see if this is still a problem? I'm pretty sure we block writes when there is a failure (recent rhel5 and upstream kernels), this could speed up the failure processing...
I'll look into this. I'm pretty sure that this issue is long gone though (at least in my configurations).
I was unable to reproduce this issue while running helter_skelter in single machine mode. Closing, feel free to reopen if ever seen again.