Re: [cobalt-users] RaQ3 slowdown after midnight, but OK again in the morning

["Steven Werby" <steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stephanie Sullivan <ses@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I was loading ad banners into my cgi based banner rotation software when
> about 12:30am cgi became very very slow. Like a minute to do what was
almost
> instaneous a few minutes before.

Since you didn't supply the name of the banner rotation software, it'll be
difficult to help you.  It could be that the CGI you were running is not
very efficient.  Describe *what* became slow.  Was this from the
commandline?  a web interface?

> When I could not locate the problem, I rebooted (Takes a while with 30GB
> of disk!). No change in behaviour.

In general, it's not really a good idea to reboot a Linux server unless you
have a good reason.  It's better to stop/start/restart whatever daemon or
program is the culprit.

> This persisted for another 1.5h until I went to bed.
>
> The next morning I went back into the server and the same cgi script ran
very
> quick, as it had before midnight.
>
> My first suspect was a cron job was the culprit, but wouldn't it show up
on
> the "ps aux" ...

Cobalt runs a series of cron jobs at night.  See /etc/crontab.master to see
what directories' files are run when and then look in thos directories to
see what's running.  /var/log/cron contains a log for the cron jobs.  Check
there to see what was running.  Do you have any other cron jobs installed to
run at that time of night?  Does this happen every night?  Try duplicating
it the next few nights and let us know.  Could it have been a problem with
your dialup internet connection?

Steven Werby {steven-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx}