nfsd problems with FreeBSD 5.2.1

[Eric Anderson]

Mike Thomas wrote:
[..snip stuff that is now null..]

>
>> What about network interface errors?
>
>
> To be honest, i'm not sure how to check for these, in linux/solaris, 
> ifconfig itself prints out the errors, this isn't the case (at least 
> with ifconfig -a) on FreeBSD, as far as I can tell.


netstat -i

>> If you watch an iostat during the busy time, is your disk being slammed?
>
>
> iostat seems to never go over 30k/sec average,


Ok, that's obviously pretty low.. How about transactions per second (tps)?

>> If you are using uw-imap, how big are the mailboxes?
>>
> See, this is the thing that I think may be causing the problems. We 
> are using uw-imap, and the mailboxes vary anywhere from 100k to 600mb 
> (some people are irresponsible mail users!) The thing is though, even 
> in times of high load like someone opening or accessing a mailbox of 
> this size, it shouldn't be causing the box to go down to its knees, 
> should it?


I don't think it should cause this, but uw-imap's single mailbox storage 
isn't exactly efficient for large mailboxes.. although I use it 
internally and we have some large mailboxes too, on a much less 'beefy' 
server with no problems (it is running FreeBSD 4.X)..

> I've recompiled the machine with 5.2.1-release-p9 and disabled 
> hyperthreading, we'll see how that goes.


Keep us posted - if nothing but for the archives..

Out of curiousity - did this machine run smoothly at some point before?  
If so, is the only that changed an upgrade to a more recent -current?

Just for a reference point - I'm using -current as of May 25th on some 
machines and it is (so far) very stable and solid.. YMMV

Eric



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Eric Anderson     Sr. Systems Administrator    Centaur Technology
Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish.
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