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Date:      Thu, 9 Aug 2001 22:14:53 -0500
From:      mikea <mikea@mikea.ath.cx>
To:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Strange I/O behavior
Message-ID:  <20010809221453.A1165@mikea.ath.cx>
In-Reply-To: <15218.65134.426946.295368@nomad.yogotech.com>; from nate@yogotech.com on Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 03:19:42PM -0600
References:  <15218.65134.426946.295368@nomad.yogotech.com>

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On Thu, Aug 09, 2001 at 03:19:42PM -0600, Nate Williams wrote:
> I've got a dual-CPU box that's acting very strangely.  At various times
> throughout the day, the box starts to crawl.
> 
> In analyzing it, the only thing that jumps out at me is that the first
> fixed disk is running a huge number of I/O transactions, to the point
> that it's almost saturating the disk.
> 
> However, the amount transferred is almost nil, but since this disk
> contains / and /usr (which means all the files are on it), interactive
> performance goes to the dump during these sessions.
> 
> The box is an all SCSI system, with the first disk being a 17GB
> Seagate.  The dmesg is below.
> 
> Here's the output of iostat 2, which shows alot of transactions going
> on.  However, there are no active users doing anything as far as I can
> see, and top shows the system as being mostly idle.
> 
> Any ideas how I can determine which application(s) are causing the huge
> I/O loads?

Try fstat and lsof to see what programs have what files open,
for a start. Is there _any_ chance you've been cracked and the
cracker had a tool running that spawned a few zillion telnet
sessions? That happened to me last week, causing a rebuild from
CDROM and some rethinking on my firewall rules. 

The symptoms were one CPU 97% busy with a program I didn't
recognize, and some hundreds of telnet sessions outbound.

-- 
Mike Andrews
mikea@mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin since 1964

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