High Load Avg and Context Switches

[Jeremy Sanders]

We remounted the imap and postfix partitions as ext2 and it is smoking.
Now we just have to figure out how to tweak ext3 to work better. I think
a bigger journal size might help, it is flushing to disk too often and
the pop3d processes are piling up waiting on it to flush...

Jeremy

>>> Henrique de Moraes Holschuh <hmh at debian.org> 03/19/03 03:35PM >>>
On Wed, 19 Mar 2003, Jeremy Sanders wrote:
> changed to skiplist. It's not all pop3, but it is mostly pop3 in the
D
> state. There are some lmtpd, cleanup(postfix), and every once in a
while
> kjournald is in DW. When the load really spikes like 30 pop3d
processes

Looks like LDAP is hosing your system down, if cleanup is in D state.
Are
you using any sort of LDAP maps in postfix?

> are in state D waiting for disk IO I presume. I don't know if the
pop3d
> processes are waiting for authenticaiton or for mailbox access
though.

Strace them, and see if they hang talking to saslauthd, then...

-- 
  "One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
  them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
  where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
  Henrique Holschuh