Any Profiling Tools around?

[IanWaring]

Something's happened since Friday night (the last time I did a yum update). My FC4 system will suddenly downgrade it's performance so that Gnome windows don't paint in less time than it takes to drink a cup of coffee, where the mouse variously freezes and stutters, where firefox and evolution will die when invoked, and yet leave it long enough, it seems to come back again to normal speeds. Then 15 minutes later, wash and repeat.

There's nothing obvious in the logs. Is there any profiling tool available that would help give me clues as to where things are getting stuck? At the moment, i've got no clue on where to start looking!

Ian W.

[jdaggs]

Hmm. I'm going to guess some process is using all your CPU. We probably need more info on this one. You might try opening top in a terminal window and sorting by memory and then CPU and see if some bad process is using all your resources.

[IanWaring]

Left top going. Looks like sendmail takes 20% ish CPU time, then procmail wops up to 79% memory usage, swap space gets hit - 1044216 total, 1044148K used, 68K free, then a process called kswapd0 slings up to 92% CPU and the machine freezes. When it comes back, no sign of Sendmail or procmail, swap space considerably freed up.

This is an FC4 server with 512MB memory, 80GB disk and i'm the only user on it!

[IanWaring]

Same again - this time swap space went to zero with sendmail taking most of the CPU and procmail taking 91% of the memory. The mail I received simply said:

From: Cron Daemon <root@server.minsystems.co.uk>
To: root@server.minsystems.co.uk
Subject: Cron <root@server> /usr/bin/mrtg /etc/mrtg/mrtg.cfg --lock-file /var/lock/mrtg/mrtg_l --confcache-file /var/lib/mrtg/mrtg.ok
Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:08:12 +0100

ERROR: It looks as if you are running two copies of mrtg in parallel on
the same config file. There is a lockfile (/var/lock/mrtg/mrtg_l) and it is
is only 0 seconds old ... Check your crontab.
(/etc/crontab and /var/spool/cron/root)

... and yet there's notthing suspicious in the crontab file - and I don't have a var/spool/cron/root file at all.

procmail is procmail-3.22-16
sendmail is sendmail-8.13.4-2

Any ideas?

Ian W.