From owner-freebsd-performance@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Sep 23 01:46:48 2005 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CFAD816A41F for ; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 01:46:48 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from lists@natserv.com) Received: from zoraida.natserv.net (p65-147.acedsl.com [66.114.65.147]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 8392443D46 for ; Fri, 23 Sep 2005 01:46:44 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from lists@natserv.com) Received: from localhost (localhost.natserv.net [127.0.0.1]) by zoraida.natserv.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id 64E1A7DB0; Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:46:43 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2005 21:46:43 -0400 (EDT) From: Francisco Reyes X-X-Sender: fran@zoraida.natserv.net To: mariano benedettini In-Reply-To: <15412.1126634818@www56.gmx.net> Message-ID: <20050922214142.N50836@zoraida.natserv.net> References: <15412.1126634818@www56.gmx.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Subject: Re: High load average mail server 5.3-RELEASE X-BeenThere: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Performance/tuning List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 23 Sep 2005 01:46:48 -0000 On Tue, 13 Sep 2005, mariano benedettini wrote: >91.3% idle CPU is not the problem. :-) > Mem: 1599M Active, 1704M Inact, 311M Wired, 189M Cache, 112M Buf, 14M Free > Swap: 2023M Total, 184K Used, 2023M Free Swap is not the problem. Do vmstat 10 Watch the output. In particular look at the first 3 columns. procs r b w 1 1 0 0 1 0 1 1 0 The left most column is CPU, the second column is disk IO. If you have a number in the "b" column and it never hits 0 you have an I/O problem. You HDs are not catching up. If you are using NFS and the "b" colun is not high and hits 0 some/all the time then the bottleneck is either the nfs connection or the nfs server. For example I have some servers that the "b" column would be between 20 and 60 for a while. I am currently working on removing some of the load of the machine. In my case more memory would help, but the computer vendor we bought the machine from has sent us the wrong memory 3 TIMES!!