Solaris

Friends

I have noticed that the Sun Fire v490 server with Solaris9 OS in my office, is showing a load of 12.50 during peak time and the CPU showing a max of 75% and an average of 60%.
The Application running in this machine hung last month(For reasons unknown) and is running fine after restarting it.

Is there any tool/way to check whether the system performance is fine. I think 75% util is fine,but the load factor worries me. The number of processes is 1600 and "tcpip" processes are the most of it(around 1300). The server has an application that connects to ATM's and processes transactions. No Databases on the server. I don't find any defunct processes in the server.


Any ideas or suggestions to check performance?

HG

Check into using sar to record performance data for later analysis. Then if you have issues again you can check the performance leading up to the problem to see if that is the cause.

the load is the average number of jobs in the run queue. so if you have a fully populated v490, you have 8 cores for your jobs. to less for 12 processes waiting for CPU time...
as far as I know, you could say in solaris "divide load/processors" and if that's greater than 1, you don't have enough CPUs to handle the workload...

(veto?)

regards
- pressy

I believe i don't have enough processors then.
Apart from escalating it to Management,i think i can do anything more(or can i?).

Thanks for the tip.Your inputs stand evidence to my convictions.

Thanks
HG

I somewhat disagree with pressy. It depends on the timescale. If your server has a load of 12+ a large percentage of the time then yes, it is short of CPU. But if that is a temporary condition only a few seconds or minutes at a time then long periods where the load average is lower then Solaris and the hardware should deal with it fine. Performance may slow somewhat until the load drops, but it should have no serious ill effects otherwise. That is part of what sar should be able to tell you - is that high load a rare/temporary thing or is the box working that hard a lot of the time.

Well rhfrommn,my server constantly shows a load of around 12 during the day and dies down towards the night. The CPU util too is at a steady 70%. (As per SAR and Oracle grid).
Since the avearge load is 12 which is a might figure,i got concerned and thought of seeking the experts.

Thanks for the input. Any suggestions on easing the load is invited .

HG