I'm running nessus 3.0.5 on Debian 4.0 with a 2.6.18 kernel. The hardware is a Pentium 4M 2.2 GHz with 1GB of RAM. I'm using nessj on another system to connect to this nessus scan engine.
max_checks and max_hosts are both set to 2. I've enabled all plugins except DoS and safe_checks are off. I use nmap for port scanning, and the results are loaded from a gnmap file. Occasionally the scanning system becomes very unresponsive, system load shoots up to around 10 and the CPU is at 0% idle. Today is especially bad with the system spending hours with continuously 60% of CPU time spent on "system" with peaks of 80%. If I "kill -STOP" the nessus processes, the system goes back to 99% idle. Only 800MB of RAM is used, and no swapping occurs. This causes nessus to take hours to scan a single host with only a few open ports. Tcpdump shows that the hosts are still being scanned, but at a very slow rate. What could be the reason that my system is spending so much time on kernel processes? Is there any tuning I can do to prevent this from happening? Sincerely, Richard van den Berg _______________________________________________ Nessus mailing list [email protected] http://mail.nessus.org/mailman/listinfo/nessus
