RE: [Nolug]

Memory problem?

  procs memory swap io system
cpu
 r b w swpd free buff cache si so bi bo in cs us sy
id
 0 15 1 735528 24320 11512 50556 3 2 1 2 3 2 1 2
1
 0 15 4 728744 6704 12112 46152 1282 990 1618 1071 683 870 15 5
80
 0 14 2 756392 6728 11916 45508 674 3304 816 3345 791 431 6 3
91
 0 18 2 774876 6640 11864 46400 966 2754 1260 2809 798 602 12 4
84
 3 14 2 783808 6644 11856 49724 1184 1784 1600 2242 1052 714 15
5 80
 1 17 2 806468 6636 11332 45736 1666 3054 2065 3107 688 601 12
3 84
 0 16 2 827192 6648 11104 49448 1678 3085 2364 3153 715 818 18
4 78
 0 14 2 832764 6648 11284 50132 879 2012 1334 2068 761 759 11 3
86

-----Original Message-----
From: -ray [mailto:ray@ops.selu.edu]
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2003 12:30 PM
To: 'Nolug'
Subject: Re: [Nolug]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Wimprine, Thomas wrote:

> I've looked in the top man page and didn't see anything real quick. What
> scale does the "load average" use? At what point is the system running at
> 100%?

The 3 load average numbers are the average number of processes in the run
queue for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. There really is no "scale", it
just depends on how powerful your machine is. A large machine might run
fine with a consistent load avg over 10, whereas a smaller machine would
start choking around 3.

Running at 100% of what? The main things you want to check is cpu,
memory, disk i/o, and network i/o. Vmstat is a quick and powerful tool to
check cpu and memory. Run 'vmstat 10', wait 10 seconds, and look at your
cpu columns (us=user, sy=system, id=idle) to see how much idle cpu time
you have. If idle cpu time is always low (under 20%), then you have a cpu
bottleneck. Then look at the swap columns (si=swapin, so=swapout). If
you're constantly swapping, then you might have a memory problem. You can
also run 'iostat -x 10' to check which partition/disk is busiest, to
pinpoint any disk/controller i/o bottlenecks.

ray

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Received on 12/18/03