head node has an extremely high load average.

[Miner, Jonathan W (US SSA)]

> From: redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com [redhat-list-bounces at redhat.com] on behalf of Yixin Luo [luoyixin at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 17:56
> To: General Red Hat Linux discussion list
> Subject: Re: head node has an extremely high load average.
>
> NFS may hang up. Have you tried running autofs?

Can you explain why "autofs" would be better than NFS?   I have not managed any NFS-based systems for nearly a decade, but from what I remember, autofs simplifies the management aspect of network filesystems; but NFS is still the underlaying protocol.  Without autofs, things were mounted all the time, and you'd have to push changes out to all the clients' /etc/fstab files.

As for Margaret's original problem, her system looks very I/O bound.  Like someone else suggested, I'd start looking at the local disk performance and see if one disk, or one bus was in contention for most of the traffic.  Then look at the number of nfsd processes and make sure they're appropriate for the expected load. The iozone program should help you with this task.

http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/05/iozone-examples/

- Jon