[loonyx | rolf joho] wrote:
hi there
on my new woody-box i experience some major performance problems.
thez appeared a day a go and i can not link this to any of my
activities...
>>> what i observe:
* there is constantly a hell lot of disk-activity.
* starting X/gdm at boot takes around 2 minutes (restarting goes much
faster).
* applications sometimes take ages to start, eventhough right now
things run quite well.
* multiple instances of sendmail (currently 3) are continiously running.
What are the continuous instances doing? `ps awux | grep sendmail`
will provide much more info than just ps. I would guess that you have
one daemon on port 25, one MSP daemon, and possibly a queue runner
hanging around...
* there might be a problem in delivering root-mail although i have
set up an alias to myself. /var/mail is empty (no mailboxes there) -
the mailqueue is empty right now.
* memory- swap- and disk-usage are in the usual range, hardware seems
to be fine.
>>> what i've done so far:
* i did some monitoring using top and ps (see output below) but their
output seemed pretty 'standard' to me.
Hit "M" to sort by memory usage, also hit "P" to sort by CPU usage.
Check the top offenders in each catagory to see if anything stands
out. Looks like something's chewing RAM...
* installed exim instead of sendmail but went back as this did not
have any effect.
If sendmail was appearing to be the culprit, I'd suggest turning off
host status caching (unless the cache was on a reiserfs filesystem)
>>> what i would like to know:
* has anyone any idea how to effectively track those
performance-problems?
* how do i monitor disk-activity at all (there is not even a disk-led
on my box)?
* any idea why there are no mailbox-files in /var/mail ?
Have you set things up to deliver differently? Has the machine
actually received mail to be delivered locally (the mbox files will
not be created until you receive mail, IIRC).
i know these are a lot of questions and i am not even sure if there
is any relationsship between them. below is the output of top and ps.
thanks for any advice
rolf
I also suggest that you uninstall identd. Also turn off identd
checking in sendmail.mc (define(`confTO_IDENT',`0')dnl). It's not
needed, not useful, and will slow down your mail run.
Turn off the other stuff you don't need (do you really need named
running? lwresd? gdm? lpt? XFree86? oafd?) You're running a lot of
stuff on this box, some of which may be contending for resources.
Looks like you're running SCSI... what's your partitioning scheme look
like? What are you mounting remotely via NFS? what are you exporting
via NFS?
Run `ps awux | grep D` a couple of times, look for processes that are
getting blocked during disk accesses.
What kernel are you running?
What SCSI controller?
What processor are you running?
Good luck!
--Rich
_________________________________________________________
Rich Puhek
ETN Systems Inc.
2125 1st Ave East
Hibbing MN 55746
tel: 218.262.1130
email: rpuhek@etnsystems.com
_________________________________________________________