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#! rnews 2034 bsd Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.cs.su.oz.au!metro!metro!munnari.OZ.AU!news.Hawaii.Edu!news.caldera.com!enews.sgi.com!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!newsfeed.san.rr.com!usenet From: bscott@ucsd.edu (Brian Scott) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Subject: Spikes in server load Date: Sun, 13 Apr 1997 23:10:43 GMT Organization: None Lines: 32 Message-ID: <335165a0.18772346@192.168.0.1> Reply-To: None NNTP-Posting-Host: dt6h3n8a.san.rr.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Newsreader: Forte Agent .99f/32.275 Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:39299 Hello. We've got two FreeBSD servers (2.2.1R and 2.1.7R) on a loaded 10baseT hub. I've noticed the following behavior: server load is usually 0, but in a single second will spike to something > 1. Since this is a one-minute average, this would indicate that there was a _huge_ load spike during the period of one second. This happens quite often on both computers: 4:01PM up 18 days, 19:06, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.02, 0.08 4:01PM up 18 days, 19:06, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.02, 0.08 4:01PM up 18 days, 19:06, 2 users, load averages: 1.76, 0.39, 0.21 4:02PM up 18 days, 19:06, 2 users, load averages: 1.62, 0.38, 0.21 4:02PM up 18 days, 19:06, 2 users, load averages: 1.49, 0.37, 0.21 Any ideas on what could be causing this behavior? Or is 'uptime' just inaccurate? Maybe a software configuration problem? Could this be happening if the hub is completely maxed out, and FreeBSD is having to trash packets due to excessive collisions? Netstat reports an average of 50-100 collisions per second at 50k-100k network traffic per second. Both servers run Apache 1.2b6, but the web servers aren't heavily loaded. One runs named; the other does not. One is a PPro 200, 512k, 64mb, 3Com PCI The other is a Pentium 200, 256k, 64mb, Intel PCI Any help would be appreciated. Thanks, Brian Scott bscott@ucsd.edu