Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
DAve wrote: Chuck Swiger wrote: It might be reasonable to try hyperthreading enabled, as your type of load might be improved by it on Funny that, enabling hyperthreading immediately dropped my load by half, I see CPU0, CPU1, CPU2, CPU3 now in top. I also see my CPU load reporting correctly as well. I see ranges from 10% idle to 80% idle, not locked at 50% and above. That seems to have cured several ills. I will know more Monday at 8:30am when the business email traffic kicks in. DAve Just a quick note, we survived the day in good form. The servers have dropped their load numbers by 50% under a heavy load and by 80% under a normal load. More importantly, Nagios shows that SMTP is always responding and the load balancers are now showing a max of 34 active connections on each server where before they were showing 350+. Connections are opening and closing far far quicker. machdep.hyperthreading_allowed=1 has been added to /etc/sysctl.conf On a related note, I met Chuck back in 1999 in Seattle at a SeaFug meeting. I doubt he remembers me but he and John Polstra coached me through changing from a Mac Admin to a BSD admin. I've read Chuck's posts on multiple maillists that we both have, or do, share subscriptions to. Chuck, you are always helpful, never mean, and you encourage detective work to identify a problem rather than recite the upgrade mantra. Your knowledge has helped countless people over the years, including me. I appreciate that. If you have a wish list, I can't find it. I would sure like to buy you a CD or something since I can't buy you a beer. Thank you for your time, thanks to everyone on the list for their time. DAve -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
On May 12, 2008, at 2:27 PM, DAve wrote: On a related note, I met Chuck back in 1999 in Seattle at a SeaFug meeting. I doubt he remembers me but he and John Polstra coached me through changing from a Mac Admin to a BSD admin. I've read Chuck's posts on multiple maillists that we both have, or do, share subscriptions to. Chuck, you are always helpful, never mean, and you encourage detective work to identify a problem rather than recite the upgrade mantra. Your knowledge has helped countless people over the years, including me. I appreciate that. If you have a wish list, I can't find it. I would sure like to buy you a CD or something since I can't buy you a beer. Well, you're most welcome. If you ever show up for one of the Apple events like a MacWorld or WWDC, you might run into me again...or at a Tommy's Tequila run, afterwards. :-) -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
and what most unix users do. It is what a lot of unix users have done historically, but now that there is and still most do. It's not a Unix way versus Other OS Way thing -- its a response to the change in direction hardware development has taken over the past several years. Chip on multichip hardware you can do many different things too - even faster as it's spread over cores. and how much cache RAM there is on each chip. 4 cores and 8MB is just the latest step in that evolutionary arms race. that's much better than more gigaherts way. any unix should support it good - with any kind of load. today i see performance improvements are mostly towards synthetic benchmarks like running 8 threads of mysql server. it looks cool on paper, but we need good performance when running concurrently many different things. if one plan to use single one program - why unix at all? as i've tested 7.0 once, it was on same computer noticably slower under high load of different programs. now i read 6.* is slower than 4.* (i never user 4.*) isn't it something wrong with it?! It depends very much on the application load you have to support and the sort of hardware you have available. For the sort of multicore chips that are all the rage nowadays, I'd go with 7.0 every time, even running single threaded applications. did you actually made a comparision with 6.*? not with paper benchmarks but just run 100 different things and check how responsive machine is. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Wojciech Puchar wrote: It depends very much on the application load you have to support and the sort of hardware you have available. For the sort of multicore chips that are all the rage nowadays, I'd go with 7.0 every time, even running single threaded applications. did you actually made a comparision with 6.*? not with paper benchmarks but just run 100 different things and check how responsive machine is. My experience is of dealing with servers where each machine typically has a small number of important applications -- frequently only /one/ application -- which it has to run as efficiently as possible, and for a large number of end-users. The most telling example was a MySQL server which we originally configured with 6.3 -- but it just collapsed under the full load when we made it the back end for a popular web forums site. Exactly the same hardware is in use now running 7.0 and not only is that DB server cruising along quite happily, but we've been able to add a bunch more web servers at the front of the site. That's the most remarkable improvement I've seen, but it is not at all untypical. I can't speak to the model of needing to run hundreds of different applications on the same server -- about the closest thing I have to that is my personal laptop (but only dozens of apps, rather than hundreds), and other than being vaguely aware that it seems to be working adequately, I've never even tried to compare before and after performance. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
but just run 100 different things and check how responsive machine is. My experience is of dealing with servers where each machine typically has a small number of important applications -- frequently only /one/ application so why you need unix at all? :) I can't speak to the model of needing to run hundreds of different what is what i do. put everything on one server, only dividing things on many when one is unable to cope (very rare case). applications on the same server -- about the closest thing I have to that is my personal laptop (but only dozens of apps, rather than hundreds), and other than being vaguely aware that it seems to be working adequately, I've try as simple and stupid thing under load cat /dev/zero somefile (on big partition) on 6.* and 7.* and compare both cases. :) ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Wojciech Puchar wrote: but just run 100 different things and check how responsive machine is. My experience is of dealing with servers where each machine typically has a small number of important applications -- frequently only /one/ application so why you need unix at all? :) At the risk of belabouring the obvious: i) I like the price. Free. ii) I like the operating environment -- CLIs aren't to everyone's taste, but I find they give me the freedom to do what I want without having to jump through a whole lot of hoops. iii) I like the efficiency of the OS -- you get that much more performance out of every machine it's like having additional servers for free. try as simple and stupid thing under load cat /dev/zero somefile (on big partition) on 6.* and 7.* and compare both cases. :) I thought you were pillorying synthetic benchmarks upthread? Filling up a partition with a file of zeros is pretty unlikely as a real-world task. I wouldn't be too disappointed if that didn't run as fast as it possibly could, although I would be distinctly peeved if doing that on a loaded server took up more of the system resources than it had any right or justification to do, to the detriment of anything else running on that machine. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
At the risk of belabouring the obvious: i) I like the price. Free. no system is free too ;) iii) I like the efficiency of the OS -- you get that much more performance out of every machine it's like having additional servers for free. single app writen for bare hardware would be the fastest. you use unix only because software you use require it. simple. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
On Saturday 10 May 2008 09:10:37 Wojciech Puchar wrote: and what most unix users do. It is what a lot of unix users have done historically, but now that there is and still most do. It's not a Unix way versus Other OS Way thing -- its a response to the change in direction hardware development has taken over the past several years. Chip on multichip hardware you can do many different things too - even faster as it's spread over cores. Do you realize your own arguments are in favor of moving to 7.x? Since the concurrency on 7.x with ULE has improved so much more, running multiprogram pipelines or completely different programs will improve as well. And as a bonus you get improved threading for the programs that use them. Secondly, the unix way would be the way that scales best and in practice, machines dedicated to one task scale easier then machines that do it all, especially since you can tune the hardware and kernel. Thirdly, unix also got big, because it was able to split one task over multiple machines. -- Mel Problem with today's modular software: they start with the modules and never get to the software part. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Good morning. I recently upgraded our two email gateways from 4.8 to 6.2. The required software was upgraded as well which consists of MailScanner and Sendmail. Both had been keep up to date so it was not a jump in required resources. The issue I am seeing is that my server load, under the same traffic load, has increased 4 times or more. Where previously we saw a high load on the servers of 5 to 8, we are now seeing 14 to 17. Since the upgrade Sendmail has begun to timeout connections. I have been digging through the system, mail lists, forums, anything to help determine the cause of the increased load. Here are some examples of what I am seeing. bash-2.05b# vmstat -w2 procs memory pagedisks faults cpu r b w avmfre flt re pi po fr sr da0 da1 in sy cs us sy id 12 5 0 2234516 199864 772 4 0 4 431 447 0 0 485 564 927 29 4 67 11 6 0 2229788 181352 8631 0 0 0 5597 0 0 0 294 2592 1236 45 5 50 9 5 0 2227208 168144 6456 0 0 0 4607 0 2 0 278 1333 898 46 4 50 11 5 0 2229068 175868 5164 0 0 0 5423 0 0 0 212 766 541 47 3 50 14 7 0 1948392 236296 8136 0 0 0 12382 0 14 0 368 4135 1504 42 8 50 4 3 2 1744620 321024 7550 0 0 0 13454 0 23 6 752 11417 3919 42 8 50 12 5 0 1951788 258944 12490 0 0 0 11295 0 0 5 727 18566 4844 40 10 50 16 6 0 2155668 214324 8231 0 0 0 4230 0 1 29 724 15531 4381 41 9 50 8 6 1 2044828 242084 4567 0 0 0 9119 0 0 12 774 12196 3225 43 7 50 bash-2.05b# top last pid: 85205; load averages: 12.89, 13.78, 14.66 up 47+15:51:31 15:20:01 126 processes: 12 running, 79 sleeping, 35 zombie CPU states: 43.8% user, 0.0% nice, 6.3% system, 0.0% interrupt, 50.0% idle Mem: 1008M Active, 582M Inact, 211M Wired, 78M Cache, 112M Buf, 122M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 304M Used, 3792M Free, 7% Inuse I am suspicious of the kernel being the culprit because the system looks as if it is not working very hard, CPU load never shows above 50% idle. I found one thread which mentions that as an issue and offers a patch. http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2007-February/022526.html Currently I am running the SMP-GENERIC kernel and sysctl shows the following. hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz machdep.hlt_logical_cpus: 0 machdep.hyperthreading_allowed: 0 kern.smp.cpus: 4 I see dev.cpu.0 through dev.cpu.3 Can anyone offer a solution? Is this a known issue I can easily correct? At this point I am left with either rolling back to 4.11 or trying another OS. I am thinking I have missed something obvious and I need to make a sysctl change to get the system working properly. Any help is appreciated, I'm losing mail. Thanks, Dave -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
DAve wrote: Good morning. I recently upgraded our two email gateways from 4.8 to 6.2. The required software was upgraded as well which consists of MailScanner and Sendmail. Both had been keep up to date so it was not a jump in required resources. The issue I am seeing is that my server load, under the same traffic load, has increased 4 times or more. Where previously we saw a high load on the servers of 5 to 8, we are now seeing 14 to 17. Since the upgrade Sendmail has begun to timeout connections. FreeBSD 6.2 is I believe slower than 4.11 for single processor systems and processes which pretty much run single threaded -- ie. exactly what you're trying to run. This would cause exactly the sort of symptoms you're seeing. Try 7.0 instead -- it has all of the speed at multi-threaded, multi-core type stuff but has also regained the sort of performance levels you could get from 4.x at the sort of tasks 4.x is really good at. You should evaluate SCHED_4BSD vs. SCHED_ULE for your workload. SCHED_4BSD is still the default in 7.0, but SCHED_ULE gives better numbers for many workloads, and it only missed being the default in 7.0 because it hadn't had enough time to settle into the tree before the release. SCHED_ULE will be the default from 7.1 onwards. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
On May 9, 2008, at 8:54 AM, DAve wrote: The issue I am seeing is that my server load, under the same traffic load, has increased 4 times or more. Where previously we saw a high load on the servers of 5 to 8, we are now seeing 14 to 17. Since the upgrade Sendmail has begun to timeout connections. You should look more into the status of the various processes, and how long it takes your mail scanning to process a message compared to previously. It might be the case that the config under 6.2 is allowing more instances to run at once and is just barely nudging the system into excessive paging. Once that happens, performance drops and the system load increases significantly. Do a couple of ps aux | head -20 every 5 minutes or so, and put that data somewhere on a website, the process states will help give a better picture of what's going on. [ ... ] bash-2.05b# top last pid: 85205; load averages: 12.89, 13.78, 14.66 up 47+15:51:31 15:20:01 126 processes: 12 running, 79 sleeping, 35 zombie CPU states: 43.8% user, 0.0% nice, 6.3% system, 0.0% interrupt, 50.0% idle Mem: 1008M Active, 582M Inact, 211M Wired, 78M Cache, 112M Buf, 122M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 304M Used, 3792M Free, 7% Inuse I am suspicious of the kernel being the culprit because the system looks as if it is not working very hard, CPU load never shows above 50% idle. I found one thread which mentions that as an issue and offers a patch. http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2007-February/022526.html Currently I am running the SMP-GENERIC kernel and sysctl shows the following. hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz machdep.hlt_logical_cpus: 0 machdep.hyperthreading_allowed: 0 kern.smp.cpus: 4 I see dev.cpu.0 through dev.cpu.3 Can anyone offer a solution? Is this a known issue I can easily correct? At this point I am left with either rolling back to 4.11 or trying another OS. It might be reasonable to try hyperthreading enabled, as your type of load might be improved by it on -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
software was upgraded as well which consists of MailScanner and Sendmail. Both had been keep up to date so it was not a jump in required resources. The issue I am seeing is that my server load, under the same traffic load, has increased 4 times or more. Where previously we saw a high load on the servers of 5 to 8, we are now seeing 14 to 17. Since the upgrade Sendmail has begun to timeout connections. do you feel that system goes slower? i think it's just the matter of calculation method - 6.* may calculate it different way. just change in your sendmail config the values in place of xx define(`confQUEUE_LA', `xx') define(`confREFUSE_LA', `xx') as just accepting mail isn't a problem i set confREFUSE_LA very high ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
FreeBSD 6.2 is I believe slower than 4.11 for single processor systems and processes which pretty much run single threaded -- ie. exactly what you're trying to run. This would cause exactly the sort of symptoms you're seeing. and what most unix users do. Try 7.0 instead -- it has all of the speed at multi-threaded, multi-core type stuff but has also regained the sort of performance levels you could so 4.11 is fastest? ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
On May 9, 2008, at 11:30 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Try 7.0 instead -- it has all of the speed at multi-threaded, multi- core type stuff but has also regained the sort of performance levels you could so 4.11 is fastest? For single-processor systems, FreeBSD 4.11 does very well at a lot of tasks. However, Dave apparently has a 4-CPU system (~8 threads if he enabled hyperthreading), and for real SMP hardware, more recent versions of FreeBSD generally perform better than 4.x would. -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Wojciech Puchar wrote: software was upgraded as well which consists of MailScanner and Sendmail. Both had been keep up to date so it was not a jump in required resources. The issue I am seeing is that my server load, under the same traffic load, has increased 4 times or more. Where previously we saw a high load on the servers of 5 to 8, we are now seeing 14 to 17. Since the upgrade Sendmail has begun to timeout connections. do you feel that system goes slower? i think it's just the matter of calculation method - 6.* may calculate it different way. just change in your sendmail config the values in place of xx define(`confQUEUE_LA', `xx') define(`confREFUSE_LA', `xx') as just accepting mail isn't a problem i set confREFUSE_LA very high It is already set to higher than the load we see. I don't see sendmail refusing connections. What happens is I try to test sendmail from another server and the connection never completes. I'm knockin', sendmail ain't answering. DAve -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Wojciech Puchar wrote: FreeBSD 6.2 is I believe slower than 4.11 for single processor systems and processes which pretty much run single threaded -- ie. exactly what you're trying to run. This would cause exactly the sort of symptoms you're seeing. and what most unix users do. Try 7.0 instead -- it has all of the speed at multi-threaded, multi-core type stuff but has also regained the sort of performance levels you could so 4.11 is fastest? I would be inclined to try another version if I knew what the cause of this issue was exactly, and I saw in the release notes that the issue was resolved in 7.X. But I cannot just try a new version on a production server as an experiment. I've hosed this up enough thinking 6.2 was out long enough to not surprise me. I've not compared them on any server running multiple CPUs, but on a single physical CPU server I've yet to see 5.X or 6.X keep up with 4.X. I've been poo poo'd heartily for saying so, more than once. I would hope, and I do think, this is easily solved. I've already had one private email stating a binary upgrade to 6.3 solved the same problem for them. I wish I could find that email again 8^( DAve -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Chuck Swiger wrote: On May 9, 2008, at 11:30 AM, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Try 7.0 instead -- it has all of the speed at multi-threaded, multi-core type stuff but has also regained the sort of performance levels you could so 4.11 is fastest? For single-processor systems, FreeBSD 4.11 does very well at a lot of tasks. However, Dave apparently has a 4-CPU system (~8 threads if he enabled hyperthreading), and for real SMP hardware, more recent versions of FreeBSD generally perform better than 4.x would. Single CPU quad core. ps -aux output is up, look under the FBSD dir. I also put up both dmesg.boot files from the servers. http://pixelhammer.com/Dan/ I do appreciate the assistance. DAve -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
On May 9, 2008, at 11:55 AM, DAve wrote: For single-processor systems, FreeBSD 4.11 does very well at a lot of tasks. However, Dave apparently has a 4-CPU system (~8 threads if he enabled hyperthreading), and for real SMP hardware, more recent versions of FreeBSD generally perform better than 4.x would. Single CPU quad core. OK. ps -aux output is up, look under the FBSD dir. I also put up both dmesg.boot files from the servers. MailScanner is what is taking up all of the load; tuning that area is where you need to focus. Things which come to mind are trying to limit the max number of children of that being run to something smaller, perhaps 8 or so. Yes, they recommend running 5 * #CPUs, but they also think their instances are going to be around 20MB in size, but yours are running at 100+ MB size. You might find that running sa-update and sa-compile nightly might improve your SpamAssassin performance; I've got a crontab setup which runs the following nightly: % cat /usr/local/bin/update-spamassassin #! /bin/sh PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin sa-update --allowplugins --gpgkey D1C035168C1EBC08464946DA258CDB3ABDE9DC10 --channel saupdates.openprotect.com --channel updates.spamassassin.org sa-compile kill -HUP `cat /var/run/vscan/spamd.pid` (If you aren't running spamd because MailScanner uses builtin interface to SpamAssassin, comment out the last line. But do check the sa-compile docs, you have to make a change for it to be used) Regards, -- -Chuck ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Chuck Swiger wrote: On May 9, 2008, at 11:55 AM, DAve wrote: For single-processor systems, FreeBSD 4.11 does very well at a lot of tasks. However, Dave apparently has a 4-CPU system (~8 threads if he enabled hyperthreading), and for real SMP hardware, more recent versions of FreeBSD generally perform better than 4.x would. Single CPU quad core. OK. ps -aux output is up, look under the FBSD dir. I also put up both dmesg.boot files from the servers. MailScanner is what is taking up all of the load; tuning that area is where you need to focus. Things which come to mind are trying to limit the max number of children of that being run to something smaller, perhaps 8 or so. Yes, they recommend running 5 * #CPUs, but they also think their instances are going to be around 20MB in size, but yours are running at 100+ MB size. You might find that running sa-update and sa-compile nightly might improve your SpamAssassin performance; I've got a crontab setup which runs the following nightly: % cat /usr/local/bin/update-spamassassin #! /bin/sh PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin sa-update --allowplugins --gpgkey D1C035168C1EBC08464946DA258CDB3ABDE9DC10 --channel saupdates.openprotect.com --channel updates.spamassassin.org sa-compile kill -HUP `cat /var/run/vscan/spamd.pid` (If you aren't running spamd because MailScanner uses builtin interface to SpamAssassin, comment out the last line. But do check the sa-compile docs, you have to make a change for it to be used) Regards, I appologize I should have given more info. We do run sa-update, and sa-compile. We also run 0 scores on most DNSBL tests as we run those at the mta level along with milter-greylist, milter-ahead, pipelining rejection, and greet pause. We have been running a very trimmed down and fine tuned system for about two years now with good results. I do think the upgrade to SA 3.2.4 is very heavy, considerably more resource usage than 3.1.8 which we were running prior to the OS upgrade. I have not changed the settings for MailScanner from our previous install with respect to number of children or to batch size. Previous testing showed that 13 MS children with a batch size of 10 messages was optimal. I can certainly give that a try. I will look at enabling Hyperthreading as well. I've also found this, which may be a clue to the suggestion that a binary upgrade to 6.3 was a solution. DAve http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2007-April/070986.html -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Chuck Swiger wrote: On May 9, 2008, at 8:54 AM, DAve wrote: The issue I am seeing is that my server load, under the same traffic load, has increased 4 times or more. Where previously we saw a high load on the servers of 5 to 8, we are now seeing 14 to 17. Since the upgrade Sendmail has begun to timeout connections. You should look more into the status of the various processes, and how long it takes your mail scanning to process a message compared to previously. It might be the case that the config under 6.2 is allowing more instances to run at once and is just barely nudging the system into excessive paging. Once that happens, performance drops and the system load increases significantly. Do a couple of ps aux | head -20 every 5 minutes or so, and put that data somewhere on a website, the process states will help give a better picture of what's going on. [ ... ] bash-2.05b# top last pid: 85205; load averages: 12.89, 13.78, 14.66 up 47+15:51:31 15:20:01 126 processes: 12 running, 79 sleeping, 35 zombie CPU states: 43.8% user, 0.0% nice, 6.3% system, 0.0% interrupt, 50.0% idle Mem: 1008M Active, 582M Inact, 211M Wired, 78M Cache, 112M Buf, 122M Free Swap: 4096M Total, 304M Used, 3792M Free, 7% Inuse I am suspicious of the kernel being the culprit because the system looks as if it is not working very hard, CPU load never shows above 50% idle. I found one thread which mentions that as an issue and offers a patch. http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2007-February/022526.html Currently I am running the SMP-GENERIC kernel and sysctl shows the following. hw.model: Intel(R) Xeon(TM) CPU 2.40GHz machdep.hlt_logical_cpus: 0 machdep.hyperthreading_allowed: 0 kern.smp.cpus: 4 I see dev.cpu.0 through dev.cpu.3 Can anyone offer a solution? Is this a known issue I can easily correct? At this point I am left with either rolling back to 4.11 or trying another OS. It might be reasonable to try hyperthreading enabled, as your type of load might be improved by it on Funny that, enabling hyperthreading immediately dropped my load by half, I see CPU0, CPU1, CPU2, CPU3 now in top. I also see my CPU load reporting correctly as well. I see ranges from 10% idle to 80% idle, not locked at 50% and above. That seems to have cured several ills. I will know more Monday at 8:30am when the business email traffic kicks in. DAve -- In 50 years, our descendants will look back on the early years of the internet, and much like we now look back on men with rockets on their back and feathers glued to their arms, marvel that we had the intelligence to wipe the drool from our chins. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: FBSD 6.2 Xeon 2.4ghz CPU and high load
Wojciech Puchar wrote: FreeBSD 6.2 is I believe slower than 4.11 for single processor systems and processes which pretty much run single threaded -- ie. exactly what you're trying to run. This would cause exactly the sort of symptoms you're seeing. Actually I was mistaken: I saw 4.11 and 2.4GHz Xeon and assumed the OP was using 2004-era hardware. The whole Quad Core thing just didn't register. and what most unix users do. It is what a lot of unix users have done historically, but now that there is good support coming through for highly threaded, parallelized applications, developers are going to write more and users are going to run more applications that exploit that. It's not a Unix way versus Other OS Way thing -- its a response to the change in direction hardware development has taken over the past several years. Chip manufacturers have all but given up on the race to outdo each other on the MHz or GHz rating of their products. Nowadays it's all about how many CPU cores and how much cache RAM there is on each chip. 4 cores and 8MB is just the latest step in that evolutionary arms race. Try 7.0 instead -- it has all of the speed at multi-threaded, multi-core type stuff but has also regained the sort of performance levels you could so 4.11 is fastest? It depends very much on the application load you have to support and the sort of hardware you have available. For the sort of multicore chips that are all the rage nowadays, I'd go with 7.0 every time, even running single threaded applications. Cheers, Matthew -- Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil. 7 Priory Courtyard Flat 3 PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey Ramsgate Kent, CT11 9PW signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
