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Date:      Fri, 15 Nov 1996 18:26:01 +1030 (CST)
From:      Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
To:        hm@kts.org
Cc:        kelly@fsl.noaa.gov, mark@quickweb.com, hackers@FreeBSD.org, current@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: userland PPP giving weird load numbers
Message-ID:  <199611150756.SAA06861@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
In-Reply-To: <m0vOHoc-00001bC@ernie.kts.org> from Hellmuth Michaelis at "Nov 15, 96 07:31:50 am"

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Hellmuth Michaelis stands accused of saying:
> > 
> > I see this too all the time, from 2.0.5 all the way to 2.1.5.  While
> > /usr/sbin/ppp is running, the load average hangs around 1.0.  Sometimes,
> > it'll drop.  It's odd ... it's usually when ppp is idle that it hangs
> > around 1.0.
> 
> I had this phenomenon too - but NOT with ppp. An isdn userland daemon i am
> working on showed this exact behaviour; when it was running, the system load
> was constantly 1.0 or very nearby. This all is under 2.1.5 (and 2.1 too).
> The process wasn't doing anything (or very little).

But what _was_ it supposed to be doing?

> My impression is that there is something wrong in the kernel, not in the
> applications.

I'd be inclined to say that there's something wrong in the
applications, not in the kernel, actually.  There's a chance that you
have a driver problem (perhaps a broken select() handler), but the
major causes of this sort of thing are applications failing to realise
that a 0 return from a read() indicates EOF.  Another possible is not
checking all the bits enabled for a select().

Why not be a bit intelligent; attach a debugger to the offending
process and wait for it to go gaga, then look at it to see what it's
doing?

> Hellmuth Michaelis 

-- 
]] Mike Smith, Software Engineer        msmith@gsoft.com.au             [[
]] Genesis Software                     genesis@gsoft.com.au            [[
]] High-speed data acquisition and      (GSM mobile)     0411-222-496   [[
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