[Nelug] re:cpu load

[Lucifer]

fixed it anyway, looks like something (possibly spamd) killed tty2, 
which was pid 99, and screwed the process stack so anything trying to 
check a pid, crashed. such as the webmin status thingy, which checks 
certain processes are running, every 5 minutes. these processes were 
just stacking up, and it saw them as waiting to be served, rather than 
stalled, and so added them to the load average (load avg = avg number of 
processes aiting to be serverd, no?)
anyway, once i'd killed pid 99 properly, everything was back to normal, 
except that there are a load of processes which won't die, and the load 
avgerage is 145 despite the cpu being 100% idle. i'm rebooting it 
tomorrow :)

aparrently spamd leaks memory - any way to get round this? i don't 
really want to be rebooting the box all the time.

> Tried  ps x  or ps aux  getting the PID number then using kill -9 PID ?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Andy Hoult
> AKA Gonkster
> Jolt Administrator
> www.jolt.co.uk 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: nelug-admin at mailman.lug.org.uk [mailto:nelug-admin at mailman.lug.org.uk]
> On Behalf Of nelug-request at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Sent: 21 September 2003 12:00
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> Today's Topics:
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>    1. High load avg, ps/top not responding -  any ideas? (Lucifer)
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> --__--__--
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> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 20 Sep 2003 12:40:48 +0100
> From: Lucifer <lucifer at ihateaol.co.uk>
> To:  nelug at mailman.lug.org.uk
> Subject: [Nelug] High load avg, ps/top not responding -  any ideas?
> Reply-To: nelug at mailman.lug.org.uk
> 
> I have a box which runs qmail with clamav and spamassassin to scan all
> our mail and forwards it to other servers. its load average is currently
> 130+. running ps or top just locks the ssh session, i think the problem
> may be related to spamassassin, but killall spamd just locks the session
> too. its still processing mail, but i'm not certain how long it'll
> survive at this load (its a dell, with fairly poor cooling). i don't
> want to reboot it as i have no physical access 'till monday. there's not
> many network connection/traffic, and the load is constantly climbing. is
> there anything i can do?
> Thanks for any suggestion.
> 
> (apologies if this mail is html, need to fiddle with thunderbird a bit)
> 
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