[rhn-users] Random high load - bizzare fix
Charith Perera
cperera at intertechmedia.com
Mon Mar 7 17:40:36 UTC 2005
Over the past few weeks, many of our machines running RHEL have been showing
very high loads at random times. Some of the machines run Apache and postfix.
The average load is usually around 0.5 on some machines and 0.0 on others.
When the load spikes, it's usually around 3.0, and has reached 5.0 on some
occations. We have tried turning off all services (NFS, NFS mounts, postfix,
crond, etc) and Apache, none of which made any significant reduction in the
load.
On one occasion there were a few updates available for vim, cups, and cpio.
Doing the updates fixed the load problem immediately, so I figured that the
cpio may have had a problem. However, upon further inspection of the
advisory, it seemed completely unrelated.
On the most recent occurance of the load spike, I ran "up2date -l" and found
that there were no updates available. However, immediately following the
execution of the command, the load returned to the normal value.
I am waiting to see if it works a third time. Until then, has anyone else
experienced this? What could be raising the system load so high, and how does
up2date fix the problem?
Thanks,
Charith Perera
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