Disk thrashing, Please HELP!

[Ed Wilts]

On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 07:56:34PM -0500, Rosina Bignall wrote: 
> Okay, I've done some more messing around and here's an update of 
> what happened:  I stopped some of the services, just to see what 
> would happen, and wa-la, when I stopped the syslogd, the 
> thrashing stopped.  Restarting syslogd did not cause the 
> thrashing to resume.  When I stopped syslogd, it allowed 
> python2.2 to jump up and start taking all the CPU time, so I 
> killed that process and now no more thrashing and no other 
> problems.
> 
> After a while, something started python2.2 again, while it didn't 
> start the disk thrashing again, it did eat up CPU time.  I again 
> killed it and since nothing else stopped running or had any other 
> problems, I'm not sure what's starting python or causing it to 
> act like that. I expect to see this again after a reboot (since 
> rebooting did not stop the problem before), so I still need to 
> figure out how this is happening and how I can resolve it.  Any 
> suggestions?

Hi Rosina,

It sounds like you need to look at your scheduled tasks to see what is
starting python.  One of the ways to do this is to use lsof.  For
example:
# lsof / | grep python

The second column is the pid of the process that's running python.  Now
see if you can track down the guilty culprit from there.  

You can also check which cron jobs are running python with:
[root at p6000 ewilts]# grep python /etc/cron.*/*
[root at p6000 ewilts]# grep python /var/spool/cron/*
That will help find some, but obviously not all since the cron entry
could simply be to a script that in turn runs python.

My gut tells me you're running mailman since it does have the rare habit
of thrashing a system like you're describing.  Are you mailman, and if
so, are you current?

-- 
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts at ewilts.org
Member #1, Red Hat Community Ambassador Program