[SunRescue] Loads

[Paul Khoury]

On Wed, 8 Mar 2000 09:49:24 +0100, Peter Koch wrote:

>Hi!
>
>>4:56pm  up 28 day(s),  8:38,  450 users,  load average: 1.32, 1.60, 1.64
>>(SS10, 4 HyperSPARC 95MHz)
>
>With 450 current users, this is a damned light load.

Hmmm...  Went up to about 4 or higher today.
Especially running top.

Some dumba** left his machine logged in today (nobody knows who it is/was, though)-
 he should be lucky someone like me didn't
run rc5 under his username...

>
>>4:59pm  up 28 day(s),  8:42,  448 users,  load average: 2.18, 1.65, 1.62
>
>Aha. Do the users complain? No!?!

Sometimes, but more about the POS NT servers.

>The machine has 4 processors, so a load below 4 is acceptable.
>If you have periods over minutes/hours with a load above 4
>it becomes critical.
>
>>has 512MB of RAM and has about <10MB left...
>
>This is normal. The machine will use all free memory as file
>system cache and reclaim memory as needed. The 10 MB are
>a reserve pool for short period demands.
>How much swap space usage do you have (try "swap -s")?

I think they have a gig.  It's not my machine, it's my company's machine.


>How is your swap space arranged? Do you have several
>swap partitions on several independent disks (good)
>or do you have a single swap file (bad)?

Dunno (I just do regular tech support calls, but I'm working my way up there).
A single swap file is really that bad, or just bad for that kind of configuration?

>
>Have you tried to run "top" during the lag periods? Maybe
>you can identify abusal processes/programs/users...
>
>One thing: 450 users is a lot. Maybe too much. What are
>these users doing? Reading news and mail? That would be
>fine. Doing compiler or database jobs? That would be
>terrible (even if only a handful of such users exists).
>Remove such users or the database/compilers from the
>machine.
>
Like I said above, I can't - I'm just a simple user - it's a proprietary program
related to verifying user information - the most I can say (so almost all the techs
are logged in).

>Since you cannot upgrade the machine anymore (512 MB
>RAM is the maximum and four 95MHz Hypersparc are surely
>the absolute maximum the mainboard can support) you need
>to reduce the load. Or buy a new machine :-(
>
I wish they would.

Guess Earthlink is too cheap... =(