Performance question

[Lindsay Snider]

On Wednesday 08 October 2003 15:39, Alan Fiebig wrote:
> I've stopped syslog and reduced my MS children to 5.
>
> Its an improvement, but...
>
> I still see:
>   'r' column in vmstat way above the recommended '1' (its averaging around
> 5) my TOP CPU System use is still in the 50%-70% range.

You want to be looking at the 'b' column not the 'r'.  Having a couple of 
processes waiting to run is usually a good thing w/ mailscanner for that way 
the processor always has something to do.  For example, if you set 
mailscanner's children to 3 and all three of those children were waiting to 
get a response back from razor, dcc, or an rbl, your system can't do anything 
productive.  In this state, none of the three processes would show up in the 
'r' column and the cpu would be idle.  If you always have a couple of process 
that want to be running, your processor can find productive things to do 
while some processes wait on network activity.

On the flip side, if a couple of processes want to be running but can't 
because they are blocked (the 'b'), then you start considering disk i/o, 
swapping and the such.

Lindsay

>
> -Alan