Can you give us any data on memory usage? Memory shortage is my first guess. Does kswapd take a lot of processor time - if it is then the system is working hard to manage memory due to a shortage. Run top then hit "M"
How is the disk I/O? This can cause the keyboard slowness but not the high load factors (I think). Install systat and run iostat or look at vmstat at the "bo " and "bi" columns. How may processes are being started? Top can show this. I remember hearing about some experimental kernels to handle system with many hundreds of process where the CPU queue was tuned for many CPUs but you may not be hitting these limits yet. See these two sites: http://linuxperf.nl.linux.org http://lse.sourceforge.net/scheduling/ On Thursday 04 October 2001 02:15 pm, Patrick warn wrote: > We run a database system that leaves a large number of connections to the > database open, but inactive most of the time. Since the database is of the > classic server variety, each database connection spawns a new copy of the > database. We have a four CPU Dell server with four GB of RAM. > > My problem is that the load on the computer is often well above 6, > sometimes it gets up to 12, at which point even the keyboard on the consol > is painfully slow. Looking at the cpu usage and memory usage, I am > surprised to find that they are not that high. However there seems to be a > direct correlation between the number of processes (our database > connections) and the load. > > My question: Is there something special that needs to be done to configure > Mandrake or the kernel to handle large numbers (400+) of processes? > > Wondering what it all means, > Pat > > Patrick Warn
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