system crawling

From: <cceckw_at_leonis.nus.sg> <cceckw_at_leonis.nus.sg>
Date: Fri, 11 Aug 1995 17:24:49 +0800 (SST)

Dear osf managers,

We're running OSF/1 v3.2a on an alphaserver 2100 4/200 as an NFS file
server. This being the case, it usually has only 1 or 2 users on the
system. It also serves as a mail server. As expected, the load from the
uptime command was 1 to 2. The number of users accessing the file server
was about 400.

Everything went well until one day, the load went up to 20. The output
from the ps aux command shows kernel idle process chewing up 90 over
percent of the CPU. At that time, there were no other processes running
since we stopped sendmail. This is certainly not normal. The dec
engineers then changed the FDDI card but this didn't help. Has anyone of
you experience this?

A few days ago, we added another CPU to the system but found that cpu 0
was always very busy (about 90% busy) whereas cpu 1 was very idle (about
10% busy). A dec engineer, after seeing the output of kdbx (proc and
thread) commented that it was the nfs threads that were chewing up the
cpu. If so, is it possible to spread the load evenly across the 2 cpus?

The system is now c r a w l i n g and users get stuck in their pine for
something like 5 to 10 minutes.

I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions.

Thank you all for your assistance.

Regards,
Chang
===============================================================================
  Chang Koon Wang
  National University of Singapore
  Computer Centre Tel: 772-2477
  10, Kent Ridge Crescent Fax: 778-0198
  Singapore 0511 Internet: cceckw_at_nus.sg
===============================================================================
Received on Fri Aug 11 1995 - 11:49:23 NZST

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