High load averages on a 5.3-RELEASE

[Kris Kennaway]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2005 at 10:11:47PM +0200, Mariano Benedettini wrote:
> Hi people, I've also posted this message to freebsd-performance, with no
> answer.
> I have a mail server running FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. It's a dual Xeon with 4gb
> of ram.
> The server is running Apache (serving Horde) , Postfix, Courier imapd w/SSL,
> Amavisd. Also a Postgresql as Horde's storage.
> The mail storage is accessed via NFS (this server is the nfs client).
> The problem is that it's experiencing a really high load average (see the
> top -S and vmstat -systat ) while the CPU's are relatively idle. I think
> it's a IO problem
> (nfs?), but I cant figure out what exactly is causing this.

Load average doesn't indicate a performance problem, it indicates a
lot of tasks running on your machine (which after all, is what
computers are designed to do :-).  Poor performance indicates a
performance problem :-)

You should measure your NFS performance to see if it is acceptable.
Upgrading to 5.4 or (better) 6.0 when it is released should provide
network and filesystem performance benefits, in general.

Kris
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