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Date:      Mon, 17 Jan 2000 11:55:08 -0600 (CST)
From:      Gene Harris <zeus@tetronsoftware.com>
To:        spork <spork@super-g.com>
Cc:        freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: high load, nothing happening? (LONG)
Message-ID:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.10001171149410.22596-100000@tetron02.tetronsoftware.com>
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.00.10001171219540.18018-100000@super-g.inch.com>

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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.

*==============================================*
*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
>  
>  
>  
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>  



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