Time to add another processor?
From: Brian Fox (bfoxfox_at_rohan.sdsu.edu)
Date: 09/29/03
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Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 13:16:45 -0700
I'm administering a Redhat 7.3 box housed in a Compaq Proliant server with
an empty CPU socket. The system's only use is to run WebCT, which is online
educational software written in Perl and running on top of Apache.
Apache is maxing out at about 800,000 hits per day. The server's
"primetime" is from about 6:00 PM until 10:00 PM and it's getting hammered
by students. Problem calls have been coming in about slow response times,
seven minute delays, etc. Now a lot of this is start-of-term kind of
traffic, kind of like the college parking lot fiascos on opening day. So
it's tolerable to a point as it will settle down after a couple of weeks.
But if an additional processor would help, my department can probably muster
one up.
I wrote a short program to record system load at 20 second intervals (is
there a better way to do this?) that looks like this:
while ( getloadavg(loadavg,nelem) )
{
cout << ....
sleep(20);
}
1 min average peaked at 8.0
5 min average peaked at 3.5
15 min average peaked at 3.0.
Load average seems to be pretty mystical. I'm not sure what it means. Are
these blocked processes waiting for a CPU slice? Or could they be blocked
on IO?
If it's blocked processes waiting for CPU time, then it seems pretty obvious
that the additional processor would help. Correct?
By the way, there's zero chance of upgrading from Redhat 7.3. There's also
zero chance of scaling across multiple servers. There's a slim possibility
of moving it to a better box, though.
Thanks for your time and help,
Brian
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