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Date:      Mon, 17 Jan 2000 13:17:45 -0500 (EST)
From:      spork <spork@super-g.com>
To:        Gene Harris <zeus@tetronsoftware.com>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: high load, nothing happening? (LONG)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.00.10001171317230.18018-100000@super-g.inch.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.10001171149410.22596-100000@tetron02.tetronsoft ware.com>

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On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, Gene Harris wrote:

> Ummm...
> 
> In rc.conf, have you verified that lo0 is in the network
> interfaces list and not auto?  Sorry if this sounds
> rinky-dink, but it can cause a machine to slow to a crawl.

Yep, it's explicitly defined...  

Thanks though!

Charles
 
> *==============================================*
> *Gene Harris      http://www.tetronsoftware.com*
> *FreeBSD Novice                                *
> *All ORBS.org SMTP connections are denied!     *
> *==============================================*
> 
> On Mon, 17 Jan 2000, spork wrote:
> 
> >  Hi,
> >  
> >  I'm trying my luck over here, I already posted to -questions without any
> >  resolution.  I'm including my original post and below that a summary of
> >  some responses and my answers... 
> >  
> >  [begin orginal post]
> >  We just built a large webserver machine (PII-450, 896MB RAM, 30-odd G of
> >  Mylex RAID, 3.3-R) that constantly runs a load of from 1 to 3, even though
> >  it's not doing anything (still sitting as a staging server).  The initial
> >  startup is also very slow; after about 40 of the servers start there's
> >  about a 15 second pause, then another 40, pause, etc...
> >  
> >  This box is running about 170 virtual hosts (and a full class C
> >  of addresses aliased to fxp0) under Apache 1.3.9, with each vhost running
> >  as it's own user and starting 3 servers at startup, so there are a large
> >  *number* of processes, but no swapping with about half a gig of RAM left
> >  free.
> >  
> >  I have maxusers at 512, NMBCLUSTERS at 4096, and the following sysctl
> >  adjustments:
> >  
> >  kern.maxproc: 8212
> >  kern.maxfiles: 100000      kern.maxfilesperproc: 16424
> >  kern.maxprocperuid: 8211   kern.ipc.somaxconn: 512
> >  
> >  This is all gathered from various "tuning for a big webserver" posts from
> >  the various FBSD lists.
> >  
> >  systat, vmstat, iostat all look normal, and I've not seen any curious
> >  entries in the logs.
> >  
> >  So that's the info, my questions are "why the load", and "is that OK"?
> >  Something seems wrong here, but I'm at a loss.  
> >  
> >  Any ideas where to start looking?
> >  
> >  [followup #1]
> >  
> >  > What does top(1) report?  
> >  
> >  last pid: 23684;  load averages:  3.74,  1.96,  1.46 up 7+21:10:15 10:35:38
> >  449 processes: 1 running, 448 sleeping
> >  CPU states: 0.0% user, 0.0% nice, 2.7% system, 0.0% interrupt, 97.3% idle
> >  Mem: 62M Active, 355M Inact, 45M Wired, 8350K Buf, 418M Free
> >  Swap: 784M Total, 784M Free
> >  
> >    PID USERNAME PRI NICE  SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
> >  23684 root      30   0  1976K   944K RUN      0:00  3.08%  0.29% top
> >    904 root       2 -12  1036K   720K select   0:31  0.00%  0.00% xntpd
> >   4163 root       2   0  1468K  1096K select   0:13  0.00%  0.00%
> >  httpd-apache_1
> >   3399 root       2   0  1468K  1096K select   0:13  0.00%  0.00%
> >  httpd-apache_1                                                       
> >  
> >  [followup #2]
> >  
> >  > that value for NMBCLUSTERS is going to be lower than what maxusers at 
> >  > 512sets it to, try 16384 or leave it up to maxusers. 
> >  
> >  [followup #3]
> >   
> >  > Hum....that could certainly contribute to load. Have you checked vmstat
> >           ^^^^ (he's referring to the number of processes)
> >  > to see what the system calls are like (frequency that is).
> >  
> >  Nothing's blocked, and the other numbers look very similar to much smaller
> >  boxes doing nothing:
> >  
> >  procs   memory           page          disks        faults   cpu
> >  r b w  avm   fre   flt re pi po fr sr da0 fd0 pa0 in  sy  cs  us sy id
> >  0 0 0 106760426976  2  0  0  0  2  0   0   0   0  230 474 155  0 0  99
> >  0 0 0 106760426976  4  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0  233 408 136  0 2  98
> >  0 0 0 106760426976  3  0  0  0  0  0   0   0   0  235 408 136  0 2  98
> >  
> >  [followup #4]
> >  
> >  > what ????
> >  > you are asking why high load ???
> >  > don;t you see you have 500 processes on your box ??
> >  > it's normal to have 3 of load average if you got 500 processes!
> >  
> >  Here's a snippet from a shell/web server that is doing actual work.  It
> >  has less memory, a slower processor and a number of interactive users.
> >  The load however rarely climbs above 1.0 unless a process goes runaway:
> >  
> >  last pid: 25042;  load averages:  0.38, 0.35, 0.63 13:26:43
> >  301 processes: 1 running, 300 sleeping
> >  CPU states: 0.4% user, 0.0% nice, 0.8% system, 0.8% interrupt, 98.1% idle
> >  Mem: 119M Active, 44M Inact, 36M Wired, 34M Cache, 6027K Buf, 17M Free
> >  Swap: 640M Total, 37M Used, 603M Free, 6% Inuse
> >  
> >    PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU    CPU COMMAND
> >  25040 root     28   0   844K  1120K RUN      0:00  1.89%  0.34% top
> >  24823 freddy    2   0  4180K  2964K select   0:00  0.23%  0.23% pine4.21
> >  24919 byman     3   0   796K  1040K ttyin    0:00  0.04%  0.04% tcsh
> >  24537 inch_hom  2   0   640K   872K sbwait   0:00  0.04%  0.04%httpd-1.3.3-us
> >  
> >  So I'd kind of assume I wouldn't see a radical difference between a
> >  machine with 500 idle processes and one that's running 300 and is in
> >  active use...          
> >  
> >  So if anyone even has a similarly configured box, I'd love to hear from
> >  you.  I feel something is wrong here, but I can't find it...
> >  
> >  Thanks,
> >  
> >  Charles
> >  
> >  
> >  
> >  To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
> >  with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
> >  
> 
> 
> 
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