SUMMARY: Slow server response

Thanks for all the Help! Thanks to the following for your time:

Randy Romero
Kevin Buterbaugh
Larry Ledwick
Peter Evans
Larry Snyder
Adam Mazza
Khoi Dinh
Rob Hill
Greg Gallagher
Larye Parkins
Mike Salehi
Alex Stade
And anyone else I may have forgotten.

Perhaps I did not totally explain the situation. But, the load level is
created by us running spam filters on the email coming in. When we turn
those off the load drops to about 2 or 3. Talking with some of the people at
Sun how much load average is too much depends on the type of processing you
are doing. Because we are filtering which requires a large amount of CPU
time (it has to view every message and not just the headers), a load of 35
is a push. But, nothing to stress over. (we have had this thing above 100,
local commands start getting sluggish around 80)

Some of the things that we did to help the situation was to change the
priority of inetd (pop/nfs) to -3 and sendmail to -1 (before everything was
the same priority). We attempted to put sendmail a little higher, say -4.
But, procmail takes the priority that sendmail has, since sendmail is
calling procmail for the delivery and filtering.

This helped the pop response by far (which is the complaint from customers).
Sendmail can still be sluggish as procmail is at the same priority. But, we
have a separate server that customers are suppose to use for outgoing.

In addition to changing the priority I also shut down nscd, which seems to
have done a lot for us. I had set nscd not to cache hosts, but I suppose
that was not enough. Can anyone explain that?

So, to summarize my long story. Procmail was demanding a lot of CPU time,
with popper at the same level it was just not getting the CPU fast enough.
Local shell was fine because your priority is normally higher as a shell
user verses a service. Memory is good, IO is more than fast enough.. It was
all about getting CPU time.. As far as nscd helping?? Perhaps it too could
not get CPU time..

Thanks, Scott

--
"Contrary to popular opinion, Unix is user
friendly, It just happens to be very selective
about who it makes friends with."
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