begin Dan Roscoe quote from Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 11:47:02PM -0600 > I'm having what I can only describe as an "on again, off again" issue > that rears it's ugly head every now and then. > > Some background. > > My primary workstation is a Dual Pentium III 866 box, running unstable, > with a few little hacks thrown in of my own doing including software > RAID (two quantum ATA 100 drives striped...) > > (more system info, if needed to solve this problem is available here > http://threegeeks.dyndns.org/?node=stinkfist) > > Anyway, before I wander off topic. > > While the machine is sitting here, idling really, with 3 Eterm's, XMMS, > galeon and evolution running, the system will on occasion get really > sluggish, and gkrellm will indicate that my CPU usage will spike from 2% > to 80% or higher, and back down every couple of seconds. > > I've installed and run chkrootkit, and the output was clean with the > exception of the NIC being in promiscuous mode (how do I fix that?), but > when I try to run tiger is just, stalls... > > I have included the output of ps, chkrootkit and tiger here > [http://threegeeks.dyndns.org/~dan/issues/] > > This is something that I have experienced with mulitple SMP kernels, but > only under Debian, I never had these issues with Slackware, Redhat or > Mandrake... > > I'm really stumped, as are my fellow geeks in the immediate area. What does "top" say during the spikes? What kernel version? Is the machine under heavy network load? Does "procinfo -n1" show lots of interupts or packets coming in? Nothing interesting in /var/log/syslog? Also, as a wild guess, try checking your mail logs. Exim (Debian's default MTA) wakes up every fifteen minutes and tries to deliver mail. If it's misconfigured, each delivry attempt can result in both the original message being stalled, and additional error emails being generated. Then each of those errors creates more errors, yadayada. /var/log/mail.log and /var/log/exim/mainlog are the ones to look at. -- Rob Weir <rweir@ertius.org> | mlspam@ertius.org | Do I look like I want a CC? Words of the day: ASO plutonium Lexis-Nexis NWO event security Hi, VeriSign! bob@e0113a27457cd834d084c76567058284.com
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