Extremely High Load
I'm running a Debian 1.3.1 system and find the machine, when put into our
production environment here, after a little while causes the machine's
load to rise, and keep on going. It was so bad it got up to 150+ once. At
any ratI ran top one time and nothing was using any large amount of CPU,
nor was the hard drive going crazy or any significant amount of memory
being used. This machine is slated to replace our current shell machine,
which is currently handling shell services, e-mail, dns, and www for our
customers. The machine is a Pentium 233 /w 128MB ram (side note: I made
sure I gave the kernel the mem=128M param), with a 2.0.33 kernel. Some of
the other significant software we run (as in, the stuff that gets hit the
most) is sendmail 8.8.8 (I rolled my own), qpopper 2.2 (my own
compile),and apache 1.2.4 (again, my own compile). We also run cgiwrap,
but I don't think that would cause the problem since I disabled it when I
first started seeing the problem. I was also running process
accounting.
Sometimes the system doesn't get bad right away, it made it 25 minutes of
uptime once before getting the skyrocketing load, but usually it will
start jumping within a few minutes (the last time I tried it, the load
went up as soon as the machine booted). I wouldn't be totally concerned
with the load except once the problem starts, the machine is almost
totally unresponsive to interactive use and I have to do a reset to
restart the system. Our old setup is an old Slackware distribution
with a 1.2.13 kernel. Unfortunately, I didn't set up the old system, so
the old admin may have made modifications to the kernel that I don't know
about to deal with the amount of load it gets (we can have like 25-30
sendmail processes + 30-50 apache processes running at once on the old
machine with little load). Could a kernel limit be getting hit (such as
file descriptors or open sockets maybe)? If anyone has any suggestions,m
please let me know. This is a problem that has me at my wits end!
Thanks!
-Leigh
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Leigh Koven CyberComm Online Services
bubba@thegovernment.net http://www.cybercomm.net/
http://www.thegovernment.net/ (732) 818-3333
"You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" - The Eagles
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