Date: 08 Jan 2006 12:13:25 -0500 From: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.ilk.org> To: Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: hyperactive dhclient? Message-ID: <44r77i3aoa.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> In-Reply-To: <17342.53734.323371.384471@jerusalem.litteratus.org> References: <17342.49804.954553.276173@jerusalem.litteratus.org> <17342.53734.323371.384471@jerusalem.litteratus.org>
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Robert Huff <roberthuff@rcn.com> writes: > Normally, I expect dhclient to run at startup and then > disappear into the background. > Today - in the process of diagnosing other troubles - I ran > into this from top: > > last pid: 48344; load averages: 3.30, 2.85, 2.46 up 0+19:50:53 14:17:04 > 127 processes: 3 running, 122 sleeping, 1 zombie, 1 lock > CPU states: 42.4% user, 12.5% nice, 42.4% system, 2.7% interrupt, 0.0% idle > Mem: 146M Active, 22M Inact, 100M Wired, 2560K Cache, 60M Buf, 222M Free > Swap: 2048M Total, 310M Used, 1738M Free, 15% Inuse, 156K In > > PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND > 226 _dhcp 1 111 0 1528K 268K *Giant 31:04 12.74% dhclient > > > Now I assume "*Giant" means the Giant Lock ... which is another > thing I've never seen before. Not for dhclient, and not for > anything else. I don't think that tells you much other than that dhclient is waiting to acquire the giant lock. Which is probably for access to the network card -- my guess would be that you are using a NIC that hasn't been rewritten for fine-grained locking. > Gut reaction says this is not a good thing. On the other hand > my gut reaction has often been wrong. Is there a legitimate reason > for this much activity? If not, how do I figure out what's broken? > (I'm running > > FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT #0: Wed Jan 4 13:41:21 EST 20 > > but this is as much a question about dhcp as it is about > any particular version.) Hard to say. I'd start by looking at the traffic it's sending and receiving. A clue is likely to turn up there... -- Lowell Gilbert, embedded/networking software engineer, Boston area http://be-well.ilk.org/~lowell/
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