bowman@uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu (12/18/90)
I have a model 320 with 16 MB of real memory configured with 64 MB of swap space. For the last week the system response has gotten extremely sluggish. Logging in this morning at the console and starting X required 3 minutes, 50 seconds. The system will make long pauses (several minutes), during which there is very little disk activity. This occurs in the middle of window updates, backups (no X running), compiles, etc. Previously, the system did not behave this way, and to the best of my knowledge I have made no configuration changes to cause this. My only information about the problem I have is that ps shows a kernel process using about 98% of the cpu time. (process 514 below) USER PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME COMMAND root 0 0 120 13:25:45 ? 0:05 swapper root 1 0 0 13:26:02 ? 0:46 /etc/init root 514 0 120 Dec 31 ? 181:32 kproc root 771 0 0 13:25:45 ? 0:07 kproc . . At this point, the system had been up for 186 minutes. I don't know whether this is normal or not. Another system on campus shows the same pid (with the same strange start time), but much lower cpu use. My SE is on vacation, everyone else from IBM is out of town. Any help on how to diagnose or cure the problem would be appreciated. Ken Bowman (Not a Unix guru, regretting becoming a Unix system manager.) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Kenneth P. Bowman, Assistant Professor bowman@uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu Department of Atmospheric Sciences bowman@uiucvmd.bitnet University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign 217-333-7105 105 S. Gregory Avenue 217-244-4393 fax Urbana, IL 61801
eddjp@edi386.UUCP ( Dewey Paciaffi ) (12/19/90)
In article <1990Dec17.224518.5188@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> bowman@uiatma.atmos.uiuc.edu writes: > > -[ describes a Model 320 with sluggish performance ]- > >My only information about the problem I have is that ps shows a kernel process >using about 98% of the cpu time. (process 514 below) > USER PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME COMMAND > root 0 0 120 13:25:45 ? 0:05 swapper > root 1 0 0 13:26:02 ? 0:46 /etc/init > root 514 0 120 Dec 31 ? 181:32 kproc > root 771 0 0 13:25:45 ? 0:07 kproc > >Ken Bowman I have a pair of 320's and I am getting the same results on the ps. This machine's been up for about 5573 minutes: 11:30am up 3 days, 20:53, 6 users, Runable processes: 4 The kproc , also PID 514, also started on Dec 31 appears to be quite CPU intensive: USER PID PPID C STIME TTY TIME COMMAND root 514 0 76 Dec 31 - 5455:51 kproc However, 'ps av' reveals that the kproc process is not using any cpu or memory: USER PID TTY PGIN SIZE RSS TSIZ TRS %CPU %MEM CMD root 514 - 0 12 4 0 4194300 0.0% 0% kproc I'm not real sure of what this indicates... In my examination of the ps output I did notice this: USER PID TTY PGIN SIZE RSS TSIZ TRS %CPU %MEM CMD root 0 - 6 4668 7600 0 3800 0.1% 47% swapper Wow ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ I only have 16M in these machine. Is the swapper really taking up half of my real memory? -- Dewey Paciaffi ...!uunet!edi386!eddjp