High Load Avg and Context Switches

[Jeremy Sanders]

> was consistently below 5. The processor is mostly idle. I thought
the

Find out which processes are in D or R state.  Are them all pop3d ? 
What
processes are contending for the CPU during the CS spikes?
What database backends are you using in Cyrus?  What berkeley DB
version?

The db is db3-3.3.11-6 for everything but the mailboxes db which I
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
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.
We are using saslauthd(currently w/ 30 threads) which points to pam
which is using ldap on another box to auth users. I know saslauthd
natively supports ldap we just haven't been able to get that to function
yet.

Thanks,


Jeremy