High CPU Load - Please help

[Matthew K Bowman]

Hello,

One of our servers (Dual 1.7 Xeon Processors, 1GB Ram) has been having
serious load problems as of late. Here is the output from top..

 10:30:01  up 17:35,  1 user,  load average: 3.38, 2.82, 2.46
57 processes: 49 sleeping, 8 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states:  80.4% user   2.0% system    0.0% nice   0.0% iowait  16.4%
idle
CPU1 states:  58.4% user  11.4% system    0.0% nice   0.0% iowait  29.0%
idle
Mem:  1029812k av,  840568k used,  189244k free,       0k shrd,  114612k
buff
                    692492k actv,   54168k in_d,   13916k in_c
Swap: 2040244k av,  118088k used, 1922156k free                  226880k
cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
27255 root      15   0 13888   40     0 S    99.9  0.0  32:58   0
MailScanner
 4237 root      15   0  2600 2488  1708 R     1.3  0.2   0:00   1 sendmail
    9 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    1.1  0.0   1:38   0
kscand/Normal
 4298 root      20   0  2588 2460  1704 R     0.3  0.2   0:00   1 sendmail
 3455 root      15   0  1144 1144   852 R     0.1  0.1   0:00   0 top
 4293 root      25   0  2908 2904  2128 S     0.1  0.2   0:00   1 sendmail
 4305 root      23   0  1060 1060   928 S     0.1  0.1   0:00   1 sh
    1 root      19   0   108   80    56 S     0.0  0.0   0:06   1 init
    2 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0
migration/0
    3 root      RT   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   1
migration/1
    4 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0 keventd
    5 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:01   0
ksoftirqd_CPU
    6 root      34  19     0    0     0 SWN   0.0  0.0   0:00   1
ksoftirqd_CPU
   11 root      25   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:00   0 bdflush
    7 root      15   0     0    0     0 SW    0.0  0.0   0:05   1 kswapd

Operating System: RH9
Sendmail: 8.12.8
MailScanner: 4.28.5-2
f-prot: 4.4.1
SA: 2.63 with bigevil and anti-drug rulesets
dcc: 1.2.11-1.33
razor: 2.36

The server is part of 3 servers load balanced behind an F5. Both of the RH9
servers are high load in comparison to the RH 7.3 server with a low load.
Each server is taking about 80k messages a day.

We initially thought it was a RH9 problem but having applied all the patches
we have ruled it out - unless we have missed something in the upgrade
process.

Any thoughts?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you

Matthew Bowman
Systems Administrator
Universal Digitial Communications

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