[K12OSN] Sever load , calculating

[William Fragakis]

Barry,
A few things - 
1) if your Xeon has hyperthreading, Centos will see it as two cores.
Look at the output of 
cat /proc/cpuinfo to see if it is.
2) does running top indicate the offending task? I've seen bizarre
things like a couple of daily yums backed up behind each other overwhelm
the cpu.
3) Any reason not to run RAID 1 on this server? You actually get better
read performance (even though writes suffer a tad) plus the peace of
mind. Also, have mdadm email you if a drive drops out - iirc, see
mdadm.conf and add MAILADDR your at email.com to the bottom line. 


regards,
William

On Thu, 2010-09-09 at 12:00 -0400, k12osn-request at redhat.com wrote:
> From: Barry  Cisna <brcisna at eazylivin.net>
> To: K12LTSP <k12osn at redhat.com>
> Subject: [K12OSN] Sever load , calculating
> Message-ID: <1283975678.1251.17.camel at localhost.localdomain>
> Content-Type: text/plain
> 
> Hello All,
> 
> Server:
> Intel Xeon 2.4GHZ - smp- 2.6.18-194  kernel
> ( As i see it Linux sees/dmesg  this as a single processor,even though
> the smp kernel gets installed?)
> 2GIG ram
> (2) 500 IDE HD's
> (2) 10/100 nics 1 activated
> LVM /ext3 (no md raid)
> Centos 5 (updated) 5.5
> 
> 
> Wondering if anyone can shed some light on my wonderings here.
> Over the summer i rebuilt our school's file server with bigger HD's
> (2)
> 500 gig PATA/IDE,and this time updated the CENTOS 5 install to 5.5
> along
> with the latest version of Samba as well. Everything else in regards
> to
> hardware remained the same as last school year.
> What puzzles me somewhat is when looking at the CPU load reading when
> I
> log into Webmin the load is sometimes as high as 8.x! I do not ever
> remember seeing these readings this high last school year. What
> strikes
> me as being odd is only a max of 500kb of the 2 gig ram is ever used
> and
> the swap is only used about 100kb as well.
> >From my brief finding I can see as many as 200 connections to the
> H:( Samba home folders),but usually a max of 15 files actually open at
> any one time looking through Webmin again.
> Has others here experienced these high loads but very little memory
> being used either physical and/or swap?
> Running top from a shell never shows any odd/obvious processes eating
> the cpu up. The load number varies greatly from hour to hour too.
> Example; one hour .60, half hour later 8.x!
> No "MY made up" cron jobs are running during the day such as
> backups,etc.
> Sorry for long post.
> 
> Take Care,
> BC