[lug] High load with 'w'

[rm at fabula.de]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 06:28:42PM -0600, John Starkey wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-05-17 at 16:58, Jeff Schroeder wrote:
> > In any case, has anyone seen loads like that?  Was it just a fluke with 
> > the 'w' (and 'top') command, or something I should look into more 
> > closely?
> 
> I've seen it at > 1000, due to sendmail backing up on a big forum.

Sorry, never happend to me/us -- such high loads allways meant trouble somewhere.
Even during "high time" our server usually never goes above 5-7. This is a
rather old webserver with only moderate amounts of RAM and CPU power
(but a patched kernel/apache to deal with large amounts of server processes).
Visits of Google et al. more or less dissapear in the normal requests.

> A load of 76 on that server is usually when several harvestors, Google,
> Slurp and Inktomi all go wild. Nothing we really worry about. If we wait
> a few minutes the honeypot catches the bad guys and it comes back down
> to 6 or so.

Seems like there's room for tweaking then ... ;-)

 Ralf Mattes

> John
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