Re: weak perfomance on woody

From: Rich Puhek (rpuhek_at_etnsystems.com)
Date: 09/16/03

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    Date: Tue, 16 Sep 2003 15:52:45 -0500
To: "[loonyx | rolf joho]" <loonyx@gmx.net>

    [loonyx | rolf joho] wrote:

    >
    > hi there
    >
    > on my new woody-box i experience some major performance problems. thez
    > appeared a day a go and i can not link this to any of my activities...
    >
    > >>> what i observe:
    > * there is constantly a hell lot of disk-activity.
    > * starting X/gdm at boot takes around 2 minutes (restarting goes much
    > faster).
    > * applications sometimes take ages to start, eventhough right now things
    > run quite well.
    > * multiple instances of sendmail (currently 3) are continiously running.

    What are the continuous instances doing? `ps awux | grep sendmail` will
    provide much more info than just ps. I would guess that you have one
    daemon on port 25, one MSP daemon, and possibly a queue runner hanging
    around...

    > * there might be a problem in delivering root-mail although i have set
    > up an alias to myself. /var/mail is empty (no mailboxes there) - the
    > mailqueue is empty right now.
    > * memory- swap- and disk-usage are in the usual range, hardware seems to
    > be fine.
    >
    > >>> what i've done so far:
    > * i did some monitoring using top and ps (see output below) but their
    > output seemed pretty 'standard' to me.

    Hit "M" to sort by memory usage, also hit "P" to sort by CPU usage.
    Check the top offenders in each catagory to see if anything stands out.
    Looks like something's chewing RAM...

    > * installed exim instead of sendmail but went back as this did not have
    > any effect.
    >

    If sendmail was appearing to be the culprit, I'd suggest turning off
    host status caching (unless the cache was on a reiserfs filesystem)

    > >>> what i would like to know:
    > * has anyone any idea how to effectively track those performance-problems?
    > * how do i monitor disk-activity at all (there is not even a disk-led on
    > my box)?
    > * any idea why there are no mailbox-files in /var/mail ?
    >

    Have you set things up to deliver differently? Has the machine actually
    received mail to be delivered locally (the mbox files will not be
    created until you receive mail, IIRC).

    > i know these are a lot of questions and i am not even sure if there is
    > any relationsship between them. below is the output of top and ps.
    > thanks for any advice
    >
    > rolf
    >

    I also suggest that you uninstall identd. Also turn off identd checking
    in sendmail.mc (define(`confTO_IDENT',`0')dnl). It's not needed, not
    useful, and will slow down your mail run.

    Turn off the other stuff you don't need (do you really need named
    running? lwresd? gdm? lpt? XFree86? oafd?) You're running a lot of stuff
    on this box, some of which may be contending for resources.

    Looks like you're running SCSI... what's your partitioning scheme look
    like? What are you mounting remotely via NFS? what are you exporting via
    NFS?

    Run `ps awux | grep D` a couple of times, look for processes that are
    getting blocked during disk accesses.

    What kernel are you running?

    What SCSI controller?

    What processor are you running?

    Good luck!

    --Rich

    _________________________________________________________

    Rich Puhek
    ETN Systems Inc.
    2125 1st Ave East
    Hibbing MN 55746

    tel: 218.262.1130
    email: rpuhek@etnsystems.com
    _________________________________________________________ 

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