I'm running a Debian 1.3.1 system and find the machine, when put into our production environment here, after a little while causes the machine's load to rise, and keep on going. It was so bad it got up to 150+ once. At any ratI ran top one time and nothing was using any large amount of CPU, nor was the hard drive going crazy or any significant amount of memory being used. This machine is slated to replace our current shell machine, which is currently handling shell services, e-mail, dns, and www for our customers. The machine is a Pentium 233 /w 128MB ram (side note: I made sure I gave the kernel the mem=128M param), with a 2.0.33 kernel. Some of the other significant software we run (as in, the stuff that gets hit the most) is sendmail 8.8.8 (I rolled my own), qpopper 2.2 (my own compile),and apache 1.2.4 (again, my own compile). We also run cgiwrap, but I don't think that would cause the problem since I disabled it when I first started seeing the problem. I was also running process accounting.
Sometimes the system doesn't get bad right away, it made it 25 minutes of uptime once before getting the skyrocketing load, but usually it will start jumping within a few minutes (the last time I tried it, the load went up as soon as the machine booted). I wouldn't be totally concerned with the load except once the problem starts, the machine is almost totally unresponsive to interactive use and I have to do a reset to restart the system. Our old setup is an old Slackware distribution with a 1.2.13 kernel. Unfortunately, I didn't set up the old system, so the old admin may have made modifications to the kernel that I don't know about to deal with the amount of load it gets (we can have like 25-30 sendmail processes + 30-50 apache processes running at once on the old machine with little load). Could a kernel limit be getting hit (such as file descriptors or open sockets maybe)? If anyone has any suggestions,m please let me know. This is a problem that has me at my wits end! Thanks! -Leigh ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Leigh Koven CyberComm Online Services [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.cybercomm.net/ http://www.thegovernment.net/ (732) 818-3333 "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave" - The Eagles ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] .