02-06-2006
I strongly suspect this server needs more memory. If you look at the IO Wait it is very small, meaning the I/O isn't causing problems. But the free memory is only a few percent of the total, meaning you are out of memory. The system having to move chunks of data between main memory and swap is what is driving your CPU usage through the roof. If you get more memory, it should solve the problem since that swapping can stop.
One way to verify that is to use sar -g to check how much paging activity is going on. Here is an example from my box.
krypton$ sar -g 5 5
SunOS krypton 5.10 Generic_118822-02 sun4u 02/06/2006
10:18:34 pgout/s ppgout/s pgfree/s pgscan/s %ufs_ipf
10:18:39 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:44 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:49 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:54 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
10:18:59 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
Average 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00
krypton$
Krypton isn't heavily loaded and has plenty of free memory, so there is no paging or swapping going on at all. If your box shows non-zero numbers here it is out of memory and having to swap. Occasional non-zero is ok as it may just be moving old data out of memory, but if it is constantly a high number it is a problem. My guess is that is what you'll see.
9 More Discussions You Might Find Interesting
1. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
Hi
I have a lot of scripts running on a Sun Solaris server, which are constantly running in a loop looking for work to do. When they have no work they sleep for a certain amount of time (60secs normally). I have 13 of these scripts running the number of sleep command issued can be in the order... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: handak9
4 Replies
2. HP-UX
Hi All.
In my production server the load is very high.
normally it used to be less than 1,but now it is more than 5.
I am new to unix all together.
I want to know what is the reason behind high load.
and if it is high what is the impact? (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: jyoti
4 Replies
3. Red Hat
Hi Buddies,
Thanx for reading my first post...
After googling a lot and searching so many forums I am feeling down a bit...
Please don't mind my ignorence, and my grammer ... :)
My server is running RHEL 2.6.9-5.EL. The cpu load is going higher than roof, almost 100 sometimes.
I am... (2 Replies)
Discussion started by: squid04
2 Replies
4. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
I've got a domain running on a few boards of a 25k. I'm seeing very high kernel cpu usage in top and cant' quite explain it. System runs a large number of smallish Oracle 10g2 databases (30), used mainly for development.
load average: 36.63, 36.68, 37.42
2489 processes: 2452 sleeping, 21... (0 Replies)
Discussion started by: utopiajoe
0 Replies
5. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
I'm not sure if this belong in dummies or advanced so I made my best guess. Go easy on me if I get it wrong.
I'm trying to determine what a high load for my system is. I run a php/mysql web server with a dedicated host. The host has a Intel Xeon 3110 (Dual Core) processor.
Our load seems to... (5 Replies)
Discussion started by: vanguard
5 Replies
6. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
Hi all,
I have a solaris box, and I would like to know if anyone has commands to check kernel usage's.
Scenario:
solaris box is having cpu 100 % issue. .
I have used sar -u 10 5 it shows 35 % kernel usage.
If you can guide with some docs that would be good..
waiting for... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: SunSolars_admin
1 Replies
7. Red Hat
i have a Intel Quad Core Xeon X3440 (4 x 2.53GHz, 8MB Cache, Hyper Threaded) with 16gig and 1tb harddrive with a 1gb port and my apache is causing my cpu to go up to 100% on all four cores heres my http.config
<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 10
MinSpareServers 10
MaxSpareServers 15... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: awww
4 Replies
8. UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users
Hi all, hope you can help me. I'm getting high load average and can't find a reason for this, please share your inputs.
load average: 7.78, 7.50, 7.31
Tasks: 330 total, 1 running, 329 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu0 : 7.0%us, 1.0%sy, 0.0%ni, 23.9%id, 0.0%wa, 38.9%hi,... (4 Replies)
Discussion started by: erick_tuk
4 Replies
9. UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers
Hi,
my VPS was overloaded and inaccessible for some time and i want to ask for help in which log files i need to look, or which tools to setup to monitor and find the cause of repeated hig load?
watched:
/var/log/messages
/var/log/secure
/var/log/httpd/access_log
/var/log/httpd/error_log... (1 Reply)
Discussion started by: postcd
1 Replies
UPTIME(1) User Commands UPTIME(1)
NAME
uptime - Tell how long the system has been running.
SYNOPSIS
uptime [options]
DESCRIPTION
uptime gives a one line display of the following information. The current time, how long the system has been running, how many users are
currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.
This is the same information contained in the header line displayed by w(1).
System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptable state. A process in a runnable
state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in uninterruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for
disk. The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of CPUs in a system, so a
load average of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time.
OPTIONS
-p, --pretty
show uptime in pretty format
-h, --help
display this help text
-s, --since
system up since, in yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format
-V, --version
display version information and exit
FILES
/var/run/utmp
information about who is currently logged on
/proc process information
AUTHORS
uptime was written by Larry Greenfield <greenfie@gauss.rutgers.edu> and Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@sunsite.unc.edu>
SEE ALSO
ps(1), top(1), utmp(5), w(1)
REPORTING BUGS
Please send bug reports to <procps@freelists.org>
procps-ng December 2012 UPTIME(1)