Hello Jack, Thank you for your response.
How much main memory (RAM) is in the machine?
512MB RAM and 133MB swap space.
What are the major programs that run on the machine?
kfm, squid, sendmail, Roxen webserver with modules.
Allot of processes run on the machine? (ps aux | wc -l)
The total of 58 processes are on my Linux server. 57 are sleeping.
What this "typically" sounds like, is you are running out of RAM and Linux is forced to swap out programs and data from main memory onto hard disk so that it can have enough RAM for the program that needs to execute "next".
I think I have plenty of RAM 512MB and swap is never being used.
Also do a `ps aux | more` and look at all the programs running. Do you need all of these programs running on a firewall / proxy machine? For example you probably don't need a full blown KDE desktop with Netscape running 24/7 on a 486 machine that does nothing but filter network packets. Kill X/KDE and just use the command line. (This is just an example, I don't know what, if anything you are running on the machine).
If it is a workstation/server you will have to take into account "what is more important?" Is it better to use Kmail and slow down the entire networks IO or use elm and have no bottlenecks.
Yes indeed my Linux box is a workstation/server machine. But I don't think that it is under heavy load even with all those applications you've mentioned above. Personally I can't see evidental bottlenecks in this system. My Linux box is PIII 600 dual processor machine with all SCSI devices, SCSI WD U/2 LVD 80MB/sec hard drives with 100MB network cards and ADSL connection to the Internet. So I still don't know what could be wrong with the hard drives. Thanks, Alex -- To unsubscribe send e-mail to suse-linux-e-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands send e-mail to suse-linux-e-help@suse.com Also check the FAQ at http://www.suse.com/Support/Doku/FAQ/
----- Original Message -----
From: Alexander Daniloff
Hello Jack, Thank you for your response.
How much main memory (RAM) is in the machine?
512MB RAM and 133MB swap space.
Then it should not be the machine swapping, I was way off on that.
What are the major programs that run on the machine?
kfm, squid, sendmail, Roxen webserver with modules.
Isn't squid a caching program? I am not to famlair with it, but if I recall correctly it tries and cache all web pages to the hard drive? How busy is your mail or web server? Less than 1500 hits each per day?
Allot of processes run on the machine? (ps aux | wc -l)
The total of 58 processes are on my Linux server. 57 are sleeping.
That seems normal.
What this "typically" sounds like, is you are running out of RAM and
Linux
is forced to swap out programs and data from main memory onto hard disk so that it can have enough RAM for the program that needs to execute "next".
I think I have plenty of RAM 512MB and swap is never being used.
Yea, this isn't going to be it. Most of the time people build firewalls out of older machines that aren't being used, like 486 and things, ussually without to much main memory in them, but this is not the case.
Also do a `ps aux | more` and look at all the programs running. Do you
need
all of these programs running on a firewall / proxy machine? For example you probably don't need a full blown KDE desktop with Netscape running 24/7 on a 486 machine that does nothing but filter network packets. Kill X/KDE and just use the command line. (This is just an example, I don't know what, if anything you are running on the machine).
If it is a workstation/server you will have to take into account "what i s more important?" Is it better to use Kmail and slow down the entire networks IO or use elm and have no bottlenecks.
Yes indeed my Linux box is a workstation/server machine. But I don't think that it is under heavy load even with all those applications you've mentioned above. Personally I can't see evidental bottlenecks in this system. My Linux box is PIII 600 dual processor machine with all SCSI devices, SCSI WD U/2 LVD 80MB/sec hard drives with 100MB network cards and ADSL connection to the Internet. So I still don't know what could be wrong with the hard drives.
Try this, disable squid for about 12 hours when you are in front of the machine, sit back and see if it is trashing as much. I installed a web caching program on one of the workstations here and it grinded the hard disk 24/7, I don't remember if it was squid or not. Also use the command `vmstats` and to see which drive is doing the trashing (it will be the one with the most disk operations per second). After you find which disk is trashing use the `fuser` command to find which PIDs are using that filesystem. Use a `ps aux | grep PID` to find the name of the program running, then determine if that could cause massive disk trashing or not. For example, if the only processes using that drive are bash and your database; more than likely you database will have to access more data than a shell. Or if 300 processes are using that one drive, you could determine that drive is being overloaded with the shear number of procs accessing data on that drive. First find which drive is trashing, then find which processes are running on that drive. After you know want is using that drive you can either make an educated guess on which is using allot of the drive allot of the time or you could touble shoot it, by disabling programs till you can determine which one (or more) programs are eating up your resources. There are ways to split up the filesystems/hard disks in the system to get greater performance from your disk system, but first you got to find exactly what is reading/writing to the disk the most. Jack
Thanks, Alex
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participants (2)
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alex@daniloff.com
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jbarnett@axil.netmate.com