Thanks for the response. I plan on trying Slackware on my backup/test asterisk server when I have a new backup server ready in a few weeks. I've noticed in some database machine testing that Slackware starts up in about half the time of RedHat and doesn't have all of that Redhat junk either. I'll post my results running Slackware after I've had time to test it.
When I said crashed I meant that the whole operating system crashed, so no backtrace possible. Thanks, MATT--- -----Original Message----- From: Steven Critchfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, February 23, 2004 12:27 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [Asterisk-Users] Processor load spikes On Mon, 2004-02-23 at 09:19, mattf wrote: > I always keep a terminal window open with "top" running for my asterisk > servers. Since we've had Asterisk in production, for about 9 months, I've > noticed with every platform and every card we've tried that the load average > will be going along at about 0.1 to 0.5 with about 30 channels(15 SIP -> > Zap conversations) going and then at seemingly random times the load average > will jump to over 2.0. > > All the while the processor idle never goes below 50%. > > Does anyone know what the asterisk process is doing that causes these load > jumps? > (I have determined that initiating new calls or hanging up calls is not a > factor in the timing of these jumps) First a word on load averages as opposed to percent idle of CPU. Load average is the average number of processes awaiting cpu service. A process could be idle if it has no real work to complete and has allowed the CPU to skip on to another process. Percent idle is easier to understand as it is how much of the CPU's time is spent waiting for a process to need servicing. The problem of using top to monitor load is much like quantum physics, you change the value when you observe it. So part of your spike may be in timing of the observation. There are many operations that could affect the load average. Any new threads loading would be in a high busy state until the loading period id over and the process starts idle looping. Load mozilla up sometime while watching the load on your system shoot up. Your percent idle may still stay smallish since it is mostly exercising the disk subsystem and the CPU is waiting most of that time. If you are seeing a load average climb, you should identify the processes starting or running at that time. If it is falling, the processes have either completed the busy cycle, or have gone away. It is still likely though that you are seeing some errant behavior in RH9 caused by the new thread library. There may be a broken select function or something similar that is causing your trouble. Maybe you should try an older RH, or a different distribution and see if this happens as well. > I have loaded up the channels on a test server to see what will happen is > the load spikes while it is already at 2.0 and with 100 channels(50 SIP-> > Zap conversations) it ran for 4 hours with the load averaging around 2.0(on > non-SMP P4) and then I got a spike and the load went upto 8.0 and the server > crashed. Did the whole system crash or did just asterisk crash? If it was just asterisk, did you get a core dump and did you do a backtrace on it? -- Steven Critchfield <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users _______________________________________________ Asterisk-Users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-users
