High load average due to hardware issues

Byetzion 30/03/2007

Performance tuning is a sort of art. You know what you expect to reach, and you somehow strive towards that through selective tuning. Either your OS memory utilization, your network settings, NFS mount parameters, etc.

I’ve been to a customer who’s server acted funny. First, it had high load average – for an idle server with 2 CPUs, a load average which never gets below 1.0 can be considered high.

Viewing the logs I’ve seen lots of PS/2 error messages. It seems that the hotplug daemon had been very busy at respawning several times a second due to incorrect hardware detection – due to these PS/2 errors, and caused high load average (many processes in the CPU queue). Disconnecting the PS/2 port between the server and the KVM solved the issue, and within around 2 minutes the load average has decreased to around 0.02.

Hardware related problems are, usually, the most intensive and easy to solve performance hogging.

bash | Linux | Scripting/Programming | Virtualization

Oracle VM and network bonding

Byetzion 09/05/201011/07/2015

Oracle VM, out of the box, does not allow network bonds. An excellent guide on how to enable bonding which I have partially followed, has convinced me that changing the relevant scripts would be better. That I have done, and reported in this wiki post. To sum things up – configure bonding/VLAN tagging as you…

Linux

Installing RHEL4 on HP DL140 G3 with the embedded RAID enabled

Byetzion 06/07/2007

While DL140 G3 is quite a new piece of hardware, RHEL4, even with the later updates, is rather old. When you decide to install RHEL4 on a DL140 G3 server, my first recommendation is this: if you decide to use the embedded SATA-II RAID controller – don’t. This is a driver-based RAID, much like the…

Linux

DBMail, the hard way

Byetzion 17/09/2005

I’ve been using DBMail as my own personal mail server for a long while now. I’ve known the software ever since it’s 1.x release, and been using it for its great benefits – Quick and accessible large IMAP folders (and I have over 60,000 items in there). DBMail is a filtering backend for server based…

Linux | Virtualization

XenServer “Internal error: Failure… no loader found”

Byetzion 24/10/2009

It has been long since I had the time to write here. I have recently been involved more and more with XenServer virtualization, as you might see in the blogs, and following a solution to a rather common problem, I have decided to post it here. The problem: When attempting to boot a Linux VM…

Laptop | Linux

Orinoco_pci performance problems

Byetzion 24/12/2005

Weird behavior of my Orinoco_pci wireless network interface. On my home 802.11b network, I get performance of about 600KB/s, instead of 1.1MB/s, which should be the approximate speed to expect to. Not only that, but browsing to external websites and the likes (I compare using wget), I get speeds of <7KB/s, and sometimes decreasing to…

Linux

Troubleshooting weird networking problem

Byetzion 09/08/2006

Problem as follows: A Linux server is connected to a 1Gb/s LAN using 1Gb/s interface. I was told that SSH to the machine fails with “socket error” when done from Windows/Putty. One of the tests was done using Linux/ssh client, and it went fine. A switch was replaced, and other methods of detection showed weird…

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