FW: Strange HI Load

[Thomas Chamtieh]

> 
> On 17/06/06, Thomas Chamtieh <tchamtieh at nayzak.com> wrote:
> > Here's an output of 'ps aux' look at all these MailScanner
> > processes!!!!:
> >
> (snip)
> >
> >
> > A 'top' will give the following, I noticed that it's 
> starting to use 
> > swap at this point:
> >
> >  17:04:48  up 7 days, 17:46,  1 user,  load average: 3.66, 
> 2.00, 1.38
> > 271 processes: 269 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> > CPU states:  cpu    user    nice  system    irq  softirq  
> iowait    idle
> >            total   43.8%    0.0%    7.3%   0.0%     0.0%   
> 48.7%    0.0%
> >            cpu00   31.3%    0.0%    5.8%   0.0%     0.0%   
> 62.7%    0.0%
> >            cpu01   45.0%    0.0%   13.7%   0.0%     0.0%   
> 41.1%    0.0%
> >            cpu02   37.2%    0.0%    1.9%   0.0%     0.0%   
> 60.7%    0.0%
> >            cpu03   61.7%    0.0%    7.8%   0.0%     0.0%   
> 30.3%    0.0%
> > Mem:  3082456k av, 3017552k used,   64904k free,       0k 
> shrd,   24568k
> > buff
> >                    2327328k actv,  431144k in_d,   39764k in_c
> > Swap: 4194232k av,  620560k used, 3573672k free             
>      236836k
> > cached
> >
> >   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU
> > COMMAND
> > 13862 root      22   0 38828  30M  2528 R    16.9  1.0   0:01   3
> > MailScanner
> > 13785 root      16   0 45444  39M  2568 S     2.9  1.3   0:00   2
> > MailScanner
> > 13777 root      15   0 44532  25M  2340 D     1.9  0.8   0:00   2
> > MailScanner
> 
> You have a 4 CPU machine with a load under 4 == You don't 
> have quite a process runnable/processor. Not the problem, nor 
> any real indicator.
> 
> That it uses swap *might* be an indicator. Do the usual 
> "vmstat 2" and look if there seem to be swap activity most 
> all of the time... That could really hurt performance.
> 
> When you stop MailScanner manually, does all the children 
> (eventually) die?
> 
> --
> -- Glenn


Yes, after running `service MailScanner stop` a few time, all the
MailScanner processes die. There's actually 2 CPUs, looks like for
because they're multithreading. As I type this email, there are about
120 MailScanner processes running, the LA is about 74%. I'm going to try
re-installing MailScanner tonight to see, maybe something went wrong
with the install, although it reported no errors when I upgraded.

Thanks,

-Thomas