High load averages on a 5.3-RELEASE

[Mariano Benedettini]

Kris:

Thanks for your answer. What is the best way to measure the NFS 
performance ?

Mariano.

Kris Kennaway wrote:
> 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