performance under heavy load

[Phil Brennan]

True, on that linux machine its more io load than anything else.
But anyway, the problem was caused by fortune -l going into an
infinite loop, and a script running this every 5 minutes.


On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 11:58:08 -0500, Vlad <marchenko at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On a highly linux machine, you lose all control of the machine past a load of about 6 - 10.
> 
> to be fair, I should note that as admin / user of few tens of servers
> running both systems, I can assure you that if your linux "loses
> control" with LA ~ 10, then something is seriously wrong with that
> server and it's not because of the linux (rather it's hardware or
> wrong kernel configuration). I had cases of LA climbing over 150 on
> linux machine - it was extremely slow but I could get it back to life
> w/o need for reboot.
> 
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2005 16:28:09 +0000, Phil Brennan <phil.brennan at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi, I'd just like to give some credit to the freebsd developers for a
> > job well done.
> > A user on our system ( freebsd 5.2.1 smp )  managed with a runaway
> > script to start up 500 intensive processes, raising the load average
> > to about 200.
> > We managed to remotely, over ssh get a somewhat responsive session and
> > kill the offending processes. Yes, I know we shouldn't have let it
> > happen in the first place, by putting in proper user limits and all
> > that, but it was amazing that the machine still worked. We thought
> > we'd have to reboot. Even with a load of nearly 200, the machine was
> > still able to serve web pages :)
> > Once the load came down past 60, the system feltl fully responsive again.
> > On linux, we would have had to reboot in this situation. On a highly
> > linux machine, you lose all control of the machine past a load of
> > about 6 - 10. This just further vindicates my decision to use freebsd
> > for this service. ( Its a shell server with about 100 active users,
> > apache, nfs, mysql, ldap ). Just wanted to share a success story :)
> > Regards,
> >
> > Philip Brennan
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> 
> --
> Vlad
>