more on bogged down server

[Harold Hallikainen]

Last week, I was out of town for the week and, of course, my FC4 system
slowed down to a crawl, and eventually I could not get into it at all. I
just bought and installed a "Web Power Switch" (under $100 at
http://www.digital-loggers.com/lpc.html), so I will always (I hope) be
able to reboot the system from anywhere.

I also reduced the number of clients (I think that was the term) in
httpd.conf from 150 to 50.

Based on Rick's suggestion, I also added this to /etc/sysctl.conf:

# below lines added 4/8/06 to try to prevent system bog downs due to
httpd. hh
net.ipv4.tcp_fin_timeout = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_max_syn_backlog = 2048
net.ipv4.tcp_syn_retries = 3
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle = 1
net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse = 1


My web server has a lot of large files that will take a while for people
to download. I suspect Apache is starting another thread for each of
these, and keeping it open a long time. As more and more requests come in,
the load just keeps getting bigger. Here's a recent top:

Cpu(s): 98.3% us,  1.7% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.0% hi,  0.0% si
Mem:   1027640k total,  1013188k used,    14452k free,     8292k buffers
Swap:  2031608k total,   244252k used,  1787356k free,   224352k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
19089 apache    16   0 45120  17m 4780 S 17.0  1.8   0:04.59 httpd
14416 apache    24   0 60736  31m 4904 R  3.7  3.1  13:02.87 httpd
18425 apache    21   0 59872  30m 2996 R  3.7  3.0   2:58.17 httpd
 8965 apache    25   0 59724  31m 4800 R  3.3  3.2  30:11.74 httpd
10263 apache    25   0 60896  32m 4664 R  3.3  3.2  17:42.99 httpd
10268 apache    25   0 60620  27m 4512 R  3.3  2.7  17:12.99 httpd
13121 apache    25   0 59540  31m 4648 R  3.3  3.2  15:00.67 httpd
13585 apache    25   0 51556  12m 4508 R  3.3  1.3  13:09.44 httpd
13802 apache    25   0 51364  19m 4504 R  3.3  1.9  13:28.15 httpd
14613 apache    25   0 60684  18m 4508 R  3.3  1.8  12:32.11 httpd
14682 apache    25   0 51284  10m 2960 R  3.3  1.0  13:36.44 httpd
14852 apache    25   0 51332  16m 4992 R  3.3  1.6  10:08.87 httpd
14853 apache    25   0 51144  18m 4620 R  3.3  1.9  11:20.88 httpd
14935 apache    25   0 51656  18m 5352 R  3.3  1.9  10:52.20 httpd
15134 apache    25   0 51360  18m 5364 R  3.3  1.8  10:00.45 httpd
15138 apache    21   0 51200  17m 5336 R  3.3  1.8  10:33.49 httpd
15504 apache    20   0 60708  20m 4512 R  3.3  2.0  10:24.10 httpd
15876 apache    20   0 51028  10m 4528 R  3.3  1.1   8:41.13 httpd
15877 apache    23   0 60520  20m 5448 R  3.3  2.1   5:43.60 httpd
16331 apache    20   0 60328  32m 5516 R  3.3  3.2   5:19.84 httpd
16633 apache    25   0 60420  32m 5408 R  3.3  3.2   5:15.28 httpd
17859 apache    25   0 60016  32m 5520 R  3.3  3.3   2:27.50 httpd
18089 apache    25   0 60040  32m 5512 R  3.3  3.3   3:17.04 httpd
18426 apache    21   0 59588  32m 5292 R  3.3  3.2   0:36.13 httpd
18503 apache    25   0 59800  32m 5460 R  3.3  3.3   0:57.90 httpd


Notice that a lot of those httpd processes have been running quite a while.

My concern now is that while everything seems to be working, I think I'm
missing some incoming mail. Here's something from /var/log/maillog:

Apr 10 11:46:48 sujan sendmail[2316]: rejecting connections on daemon MTA:
load average: 33

So... what do I do?

THANKS!

Harold



-- 
FCC Rules Updated Daily at http://www.hallikainen.com