Hello Managers,
I've gotten some good suggestions so far, but most people are asking me
questions, so I realize I left out some important details. The machine
is a single processor, with about 7 Gigs of memory, running 4.0F
unpatched. It is not really an NFS server, but it does export one
directory to another Alpha, read only, via NFS. Although, I've checked
the other machine which has 10 people logged on, and it dosen't seem
like anyone is doing anything.
Here is a trimmed off copy of top with the known process called
some_compile.
> load averages: 3.11, 2.56, 2.51 14:26:01
> 72 processes: 2 running, 24 sleeping, 41 idle
> Cpu states: 14.0% user, 0.0% nice, 82.4% system, 3.9% idle
> Memory: Real: 4352M/7201M act/tot Virtual: 48M/20573M use/tot Free: 1194M
>
> PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME CPU COMMAND
> 22286 bob 42 0 2218M 2217M run 166:17 44.90% some_compile
> 19011 root 44 0 2600K 393K sleep 1:01 0.30% top
Notice that even though some_compile uses 44.9% CPU, the Cpu state is
3.9% idle. In fact, if you watch top, it is usually 0.0%. The load
average is what is worrying me. I haven't seen this compile make the
load go over 2.00, but it's into the 3's now.
swapon -s shows it is not using any swap space. Here is the iostat
output. Notice there is barely any disk transfers. Most of the i/o is
in system mode CPU.
> tty fd0 rz0 rz9 rz16 cpu
> tin tout bps tps bps tps bps tps bps tps us ni sy id
> 0 97 0 0 12 1 0 0 0 0 36 0 27 37
> 0 348 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 15 0 84 1
> 0 384 0 0 40 4 0 0 0 0 15 0 84 1
> 2 456 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 19 0 81 0
> 3 478 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 21 0 77 2
I may be barking up the wrong tree with the [kernel idle], I just
couldn't find anything else that made up for the CPU usage.
Any help would be helpful,
Kevin
[original post]
> Today, I noticed that our ES40 is running at a load of ~3 when it the
> jobs it has shouldn't be pushing it much more than 1. I looked through
> all the running processes and noticed that the [kernel idle] process is
> taking up quite a bit of CPU resource. I checked the managers list
> archive, and I only found questions when the %MEM is high, and nothing
> for %CPU.
>
> # ps aux
> USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY S STARTED TIME
> COMMAND
> root 0 51.7 3.6 3.56G 261M ?? R < Jul 10 4-15:20:31
> [kernel idle]
>
> I've checked our other Alphas and none of them have CPU usage nearly
> like the ES40, even similarly loaded ones. Can someone shed some light
> on this?
--
Kevin Dea
System Administrator
Alpine Electronics Research of America
Received on Tue Aug 29 2000 - 21:53:24 NZST