Messages in this thread | | | Subject | SMP, Soft RAID and abnormal load | From | (Gaël Le Mignot) | Date | Mon, 26 Apr 2004 12:06:03 +0200 |
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Hello,
We are running a MMO game server (made of several multi-threaded porcessus using CORBA to communicate) on a computer with two Xeon processor and a software RAID level 1 between two ide discs (hda and hdc).
The load average is usually around 0.5: 18:58:11 up 42 days, 1 min, 6 users, load average: 0.30, 0.41, 0.51
We tried to unzip a zip file containing a lot of small files, and then the load average increased dramatically, up to more than 23. I'm wondering how a single processus can increase the load average that much.
The kernel is vanilla 2.4.25, with SMP, highmem, and sw raid: Linux mogii1 2.4.25-raid #1 SMP Tue Feb 24 14:37:33 CET 2004 i686 unknown
The filesystem is ext3fs, mounted with the default "ordered" mode.
The system has plenty of memory available: total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 3879840 3750980 128860 0 299948 1709776 -/+ buffers/cache: 1741256 2138584 Swap: 1959848 83964 1875884
I didn't fine-tune the discs with hdparm (this is a production server, and I don't want to take any risk of data corruption), here is the report of hdparm:
multcount = 16 (on) I/O support = 0 (default 16-bit) unmaskirq = 0 (off) using_dma = 1 (on) keepsettings = 0 (off) nowerr = 0 (off) readonly = 0 (off) readahead = 8 (on) geometry = 14946/255/63, sectors = 240121728, start = 0 busstate = 1 (on)
If you have an explication on why did it happen, I'ld be gratefull. I hope this report may help you to "tune" the kernel. If you need additional informations, don't hesitate to ask.
-- Gael Le Mignot "Kilobug" - kilobug@nerim.net - http://kilobug.free.fr GSM : 06.71.47.18.22 (in France) ICQ UIN : 7299959 Fingerprint : 1F2C 9804 7505 79DF 95E6 7323 B66B F67B 7103 C5DA
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