Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2000 19:54:31 +1100 (EST) From: Stanley Hopcroftt <Stanley.Hopcroft@IPAustralia.Gov.AU> To: FreeBSD-Questions@FreeBSD.oRG Subject: Off n(TOP)ic question: ntop-1.1 chews heaps of CPU on 4.x-R Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0010261952070.217-100000@stan.aipo.gov.au>
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Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, I am writing to say that the marvellous ntop-1.1 packet accounting tool, (all the good RMON things like - top talkers - top protocols - traffic matrix in software with a Web or curses interface) included in the FreeBSD ports collection, uses a *lot* of CPU. In fact it seems to use *all* of the CPU it can get. This is no big deal but my Solaris admin colleague pointed out that the same application on a Sparc E4 uses barely any CPU even when exposed to 500 LDAP requests/second. Here is ntop running on FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE (P5/166/80 MB RAM) that is only seeing *broadcast* and data from or to itself. It is a box whose CPU idle time is usually > 80%. last pid: 98015; load averages: 1.27, 1.31, 0.93 up 19+03:59:44 15:18:35 42 processes: 2 running, 40 sleeping CPU states: 50.6% user, 0.0% nice, 49.0% system, 0.4% interrupt, 0.0% idle Mem: 39M Active, 44M Inact, 23M Wired, 6712K Cache, 22M Buf, 11M Free Swap: 256M Total, 256M Free PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND 96811 root 56 0 10928K 9784K RUN 6:08 95.36% 95.36% ntop 98015 anwsmh 29 0 1872K 1088K RUN 0:00 4.13% 1.22% top 351 netsaint 10 0 1388K 960K nanslp 443:07 0.00% 0.00% netsaint 84 root 2 -12 1240K 692K select 3:38 0.00% 0.00% ntpd 32380 root 2 0 2852K 2308K select 1:49 0.00% 0.00% httpd 82 bind 2 0 3136K 2568K select 1:37 0.00% 0.00% named 126 root 2 0 1400K 892K select 1:12 0.00% 0.00% sendmail and on 4.1.1-RELEASE (PIII/733/128MB RAM) that is getting all the traffic for a small segment (<= 6 servers). last pid: 17389; load averages: 1.03, 1.08, 1.05 up 7+02:28:32 15:19:20 35 processes: 2 running, 33 sleeping CPU states: 42.4% user, 0.0% nice, 57.6% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle Mem: 91M Active, 7720K Inact, 20M Wired, 5324K Cache, 22M Buf, 492K Free Swap: 256M Total, 15M Used, 241M Free, 5% Inuse PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND 17303 root 63 0 19344K 12760K RUN 57:29 91.94% 91.94% ntop I am not sure this a problem because ntop is such a superb and useful application, but it seems strange. Both installations are standard out of the box; in particular both run the bpf and libpcap shipped with that version of FreeBSD. One of the reasons for asking about this is that "TCPIP Illustrated" claims that the Sun NIT interface is very poor compared to the BSD bpf. Could it be they have radically improved DLPI ? Thank you. Yours sincerely, S Hopcroft Network Specialist IP Australia +61 2 6283 3189 +61 2 6281 1353 FAX To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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