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Date:      Sun, 16 Oct 2005 19:01:22 -0500
From:      Dan Nelson <dnelson@allantgroup.com>
To:        Will Saxon <WillS@housing.ufl.edu>
Cc:        stable@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Disk 100% busy
Message-ID:  <20051017000122.GF21223@dan.emsphone.com>
In-Reply-To: <0E972CEE334BFE4291CD07E056C76ED807738005@bragi.housing.ufl.edu>
References:  <0E972CEE334BFE4291CD07E056C76ED807738005@bragi.housing.ufl.edu>

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In the last episode (Oct 16), Will Saxon said:
> I am trying to diagnose a problem whereby a virus scanner (clam
> antivirus) is taking too long to scan attachments on a mail server.
> We have an attachment limitation of 20MB and an attachment of 7-20MB
> can take over 3 minutes to scan. This often causes the sending mail
> server to timeout and resend the mail.
> 
> In this case, my mail gateway is is a dual 3.06GHz Xeon with 1GB of
> ram and 2 36GB 15krpm drives in a raid-1 on a smart array 6i (cciss)
> controller. I am running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE-p1.
> 
> Systat -vmstat reports the disk mirror is 100% busy at all times on
> this machine, with an average of around 300 tps at 15KB/t. This seems
> wrong to me, as these numbers are maintained even when the system
> doesn't otherwise appear busy. We don't seem to be swamped by log
> writes. How can I tell what's generating these disk writes? At the
> moment the 100% disk utilization is the only thing I can see that
> would cause the scanning delay. The machine overall is sluggish with
> file operations.

Are you swapping?  Check either "vmstat 1" or top output.  You can also
tell top to display blocking I/O requests per process by hitting "m",
then ask it to sort by I/O by hitting "ototal<enter>".

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson@allantgroup.com



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