Looking for troubleshooting tips.

[Adam Vande More]

On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 9:58 AM, Paul Halliday <paul.halliday at gmail.com>wrote:

> I use Freebsd as the base for my network monitoring sensors. These
> machines run a netflow probe, act as a netflow collector and spool
> full content data from a snort process FIFO that is bound to a span
> port. During peak hours this can be 100MB saturated, its connected to
> a GB intel NIC on the box (there is a separate uplink).
>
> In the background numerous little scripts run to produce summary data.
>
> The basic template for these systems has been the same for the past 4
> years and things have worked great. Recently, one of these machines
> started to become a little laggy and I can't seem to identify the
> issue.
>
> This system has always seen a lot of packet loss, I expect this though
> as it is a busy site but this has never affected its performance. Can
> an overloaded NIC cause serious performance issues like those I am
> seeing?
>
> This is a recent top:
>
> last pid: 98870;  load averages:  1.54,  1.41,  1.31 up 1+01:57:10
>  11:50:24
> 142 processes: 2 running, 139 sleeping, 1 zombie
> CPU states: 30.9% user,  0.0% nice, 15.0% system,  1.7% interrupt, 52.4%
> idle
> Mem: 450M Active, 328M Inact, 168M Wired, 33M Cache, 110M Buf, 3700K Free
> Swap: 2048M Total, 5112K Used, 2043M Free
>
> 7.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE #0: Sun Feb 24 19:59:52 UTC 2008
>
> To be honest, I don't know which counters are important. Is there
> anything specific I should be concentrating on to determine the cause?
>
> Thanks.
>
>
The top stats indicate a moderate load, nothing to worry about there.  I
think you'll need to focus on network specific troubleshooting and you'll
need to provide more info than what you've given to start with that.


-- 
Adam Vande More