Am Sonntag, den 17.02.2008, 00:56 +0200 schrieb jamez: [...] > There're no others services on the box, "top" shows no processes using more > then 0% CPU. us/sy/ni/wa/hi/si/st stats are all low, CPU idle is almost > 100%... and it doesn't metter is exim4 running or not! The only thing > changes when i do "/etc/init.d/exim4 start" - top's load average goes to > 50+, usually ~100 in few seconds. "ps -e|grep exim|wc -l" shows 50-300 > (runnig exim4 processes). System remains stable and responsible as with load > avg <1 (before firing exim4). I think you should have asked earlier. Everything regarding your system-configuration sounds desparate (not to say: mad) and should be undone ASAP. Seriously.
Load is basically a value indicating the number of processes that would like to continue but are waiting for something. I've seen extreme load when I had all my exim-data on a NFS-server which suddenly developed latencies. Or when spamassassin hat too many processes competing for the same lock-file (using "lockmethod nfssafe", the problem disappeared when changing it to "lockmethod flock"). I'm just guessing, since you provide no valuable information. But I'd first check for network-issues, especially DNS. Check that no blacklist is offline or something like that. Then I'd check for lock-contention e.g. regarding the exim-hints-dbs. I'd consider deleting them to see if there is a broken db-file. Later I'd considere wheter you accidently missed some information and there are additional processes like spamd, nscd, etc. which might cause problems when seeing load. -- CU, Patrick.
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