I hope someone can help with this...
We run a 2100 alpha with 3 CPUs and 512 MB of RAM as an academic mainframe.
We also run DU4.0 with C2 security.
All faculty, staff, and students have an account so that we might have about
250 - 290 users online in the afternoons..
Our problem is that in this university environment, we get surges caused
by users trying to login right after class ends, and so on mondays and
wednesdays we might have more than 60 logins within a few minutes
of the top of the hour. As a result, our load averages can climb way
above 100 (getting up to 160+ occurred on monday) and take 10 to 15 minutes
to drift back down.
(We keep performance charts showing loads and users at www.orst.edu/~ucs and
these show what happens fairly well)
We have tried blocking logins through creating a /etc/nologin file to allow
the system to catch up, but this doesn't work - probably because other processes
are started before the nologin file is checked for.
My Questions:
1. Has anyone encountered this kind of performance problem and successfully
managed it?
2. Is there a safe way that could be implemented by a shell script, to send
sleep (or stop) signals to an appropriate process to stop all login
type processes and then restart them once the load average has
recovered? If so, which processes would be the appropriate ones to
control.
TIA
PH
--
Padraig Houlahan Computer Services - IS
houlahap_at_ucs.orst.edu Milne Computer Center - 217
503-737-0671 (W) Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-5202
Received on Thu Jan 16 1997 - 01:07:36 NZDT