> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Bayer > > The problem is that all of a > sudden the load average skyrockets to 40-50 or even higher. This kills > the server and makes it totally unresponsive.
Remember what "load average" means. The number of processes that are running or waiting. To answer the question of why this is happening on your system, run top. Look at which processes are running or waiting. If it just so happens the offense is a million httpd processes spawning, then you've either got a misconfiguration in your httpd config (should lower the number of concurrent threads, perhaps) or as others have pointed out, maybe you're swapping (out of memory.) This brings up a completely separate flame war: I always say, and sometimes inadvertently start arguments over this (google "swap is religion") that it is good to have some swap available in your system - you're giving the kernel an extra degree of freedom, to swap out idle processes in order to keep ram available for cache & buffer, if the kernel happens to feel that's a more valuable resource at the time. This is a performance enhancer. But if you have too much active memory consumption by your active processes, you *absolutely* never want to be swapping active memory. (Where "absolute" is used as a non-absolute term, a couple of fringe exceptions here and there, but not applicable to present case.) I recommend giving a system generally 1G of swap space, just to limit the damage if some processes runaway and start swapping active memory. Before too long, you want your system to fail the offending processes with "out of memory error." _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
