SUMMARY: Unusual/Abnormal load average

From: Daryl Campbell (daryl@cs.athabascau.ca)
Date: Thu Sep 29 1994 - 14:57:52 CDT


We have experienced a phantom load average on a SPARCserver 670MP
running SunOS 4.1.2 on a couple of occassions now. By phantom I
mean that running top you won't see any unusually high CPU % numbers
for any processes or abnormal number of processes in the run STATE.

The problems were:

- a field in the NIS passwd file where the gecos field for gid had
  nothing in it. Just '::'. Where is that script for a sanity check
  of the NIS tables before you push them out...

- the most recent instance, we had a second machine whose filesystem
  was NFS mounted on the SPARCserver which had it's rpc.lockd tip over.

Hooking up trace -p process# to active processes helped in
determining the source of the problem.

--
Daryl Campbell		daryl@cs.athabascau.ca		(403)675-6379
Athabasca University



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