periodic, short freezes

[Kris Kennaway]

On Fri, Nov 10, 2006 at 10:18:59AM +0100, Zbigniew Szalbot wrote:
> Dear Kris and others,
> 
> On Thu, 9 Nov 2006, Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 
> >OK, you'll need to do some more diagnosis along the lines of my previous 
> >email then.
> 
> Here's my typical load:
> 
> last pid: 96934;  load averages:  0.03,  0.06,  0.05   up 29+20:47:07 
> 10:16:09
> 68 processes:  1 running, 67 sleeping
> CPU states:  0.4% user,  0.0% nice,  0.4% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.2% 
> idle
> Mem: 140M Active, 35M Inact, 103M Wired, 12M Cache, 41M Buf, 15M Free
> Swap: 512M Total, 127M Used, 385M Free, 24% Inuse
> 
> Swap use is around 22%. This box mostly functions as mail server and there 
> are times when it gets a lot of emails to send. The load goes higher then. 
> The highest I recall (with no freeze mind you) was about 7.something. But 
> typically it does not go above 1.5.

The fact that swap is in use, together with your description,
indicates that your system is overloaded; those transient loads are
causing it to periodically demand more working memory than is backed
by RAM, so the system goes into a frenzy of swapping trying to
accomodate, and system performance falls in the toilet until the load
goes away.

Add more RAM or limit the workload.

Kris
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