[K12OSN] CPU usage way up! What to do?

[Jack]

On Fri, 2004-09-10 at 14:41, David Trask wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> My performance at this point is acceptable, but not as fast as last
> year.....trying to find out why.  I'm using K12LTSP 4.1 (FC2) on a server
> with dual Xeon 2.x ghz CPU's and 4 gb. RAM...etc....etc.  Using gkrellm
> with the CPU usage set to show "composite"....my CPU usage stays at 90%
> and higher when students are using the machines.  Granted if no one is
> doing anything the CPU usage is in the single digits, but once they start
> using FireFox....OO...or anything else for the most part....the graph goes
> WAY up and stays there.  Using "top" doesn't seem to point out any
> particular hogs, but then again I'm not great at reading "top".  Network
> bandwidth seems OK....I think it's CPU time that's killing me.  When I
> show "real CPU's" then four of them show up....I'm assuming that's normal
> for a dual processor machine.  I'd be curious to see how the 4.1 version
> with fc2 stacks up against the new WBEL version Eric posted. 
> Unfortunately I'll need to "mondo" my server so I can go back to it if
> need be.  In the meantime....got any suggestions for me to try?
> 
> David N. Trask
> Technology Teacher/Coordinator
> Vassalboro Community School
> dtrask at vcs.u52.k12.me.us
> (207)923-3100
> 
I've noticed the same perfomance problem when the students use the web.
I tracked it down to the online games that are very popular.  
Especially some of the Java based games.  Also sometimes when a PDF
document was accessed from the Mozilla plugin the cpu would spike until
that document was closed.  Otherwise if they all just stuck to Ktouch ,
OO or just browsed the web with no games everything was just fine.  

To test this go to http://games.yahoo.com/games/downloads/bw.html:

Jack