[cobalt-users] Heavy Load on CPU

["SysAdmin" <aljuhani@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello List.

last night I have received two messages from my RAQ 4 as below:

_No.1 Msg_

Over the past fifteen minutes, the CPU has been heavily loaded.

This will result in noticible performace loss.  Consider moving some of the
services to other Sun Cobalt servers, or reduce the complexity of the CGI
scripts running on the Sun Cobalt server itself.

1 minute load average:	67.99
5 minute load average:	60.51
15 minute load average:	27.50

_No.2 Msg_

Memory on the Sun Cobalt server is heavily used.
The Sun Cobalt server needs more memory than it currently has.
Consider adding more DRAM to the server.

Total memory is:	389092 KB
Used memory is:	378296 KB
Free memory is:	10796 KB
Percent used is:	97

I do not have large scripts or cgis on the sever.  The server now works fine with light load (0.00%) on CPU and 43% memory usage.

I checked my daily log and the following appeared during the high load period:

May 23 20:15:10 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 36
May 23 20:15:27 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 36
May 23 20:16:16 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 34
May 23 20:16:41 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 69
May 23 20:17:02 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 82
May 23 20:17:57 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 134
May 23 20:18:18 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 130
May 23 20:18:35 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 124
May 23 20:18:57 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 108
May 23 20:19:16 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 86
May 23 20:19:34 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 82
May 23 20:19:49 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 68
May 23 20:20:00 ns imapd[1851]: imap service init from 127.0.0.1
May 23 20:20:00 ns imapd[1851]: Logout user=??? host=localhost [127.0.0.1]
May 23 20:20:04 ns sendmail[22988]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 53
May 23 20:20:17 ns sendmail[1911]: starting daemon (8.10.2): SMTP+queueing@01:00:00
May 23 20:20:17 ns sendmail[1911]: runqueue: Skipping queue run -- load average too high
May 23 20:20:17 ns sendmail[1911]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 42
May 23 20:20:32 ns sendmail[1911]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 33
May 23 20:20:47 ns sendmail[1911]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 26
May 23 20:21:02 ns sendmail[1911]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA: load average: 20
May 23 20:30:03 ns imapd[2364]: imap service init from 127.0.0.1
May 23 20:30:03 ns imapd[2364]: Logout user=??? host=localhost [127.0.0.1]
May 23 20:30:04 ns sendmail[2366]: NOQUEUE: localhost [127.0.0.1] did not issue MAIL/EXPN/VRFY/ETRN during connection to MTA

BTW at 2000 HRS, 19 minutes before the load surge there was a pop3 account mail access from one of our users.

Any idea what has caused this load surge.

Thanks