Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] Insane load on gentoo server - possibly clamassassin related?
Date: Mon, 29 Jun 2009 17:17:05
Message-Id: 200906291913.46231.alan.mckinnon@gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-user] Insane load on gentoo server - possibly clamassassin related? by Steve
1 On Monday 29 June 2009 19:04:44 Steve wrote:
2 > Today my gentoo server that has sat happily churning my mundane (and
3 > lightweight) tasks froze and I noticed when it stopped serving DNS
4 > queries... and the server was even unresponsive from the command
5 > prompt. I rebooted.... and was a bit taken aback at what I found.
6 >
7 > The server currently runs, but has a load of over 60, where I'd expect a
8 > load of below 0.1. Investigations using top did not suggest that a
9 > single process was using vast amounts of processing time... but there
10 > were significantly more clamascan processes than I'd expect... and even
11 > more procmail processes....
12 >
13 > --
14 > $ ps auwx | grep clamscan | grep -v grep | wc -l
15 > 42
16 > $ ps auwx | grep procmail | grep -v grep | wc -l
17 > 94
18 > $ ps auwx | grep clamassassin | grep -v grep | wc -l
19 > 55
20 > --
21 >
22 > The first few lines from top say:
23 >
24 > --
25 > PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
26 > 15451 usr 20 0 35944 33m 872 D 2.7 3.3 0:00.60 clamscan
27 > 216 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.7 0.0 0:03.80 kswapd0
28 > 15116 usr 20 0 76136 15m 668 D 0.7 1.6 0:03.30 clamscan
29 > 15299 usr 20 0 2584 1224 840 R 0.7 0.1 0:04.36 top
30 > 15428 usr 20 0 61288 57m 872 D 0.7 5.7 0:01.38 clamscan
31 > 1 root 20 0 1648 196 172 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.64 init
32 > 2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
33 > --
34 >
35 > The procmail configuration I've adopted hasn't changed in years...
36 > --
37 > DEFAULT=$HOME/.maildir/
38 > SHELL=/bin/sh
39 > MAILDIR=$HOME/.maildir
40 >
41 > :0fw
42 >
43 > * < 1024000
44 >
45 > | /usr/bin/clamassassin | /usr/bin/spamc -f
46 >
47 > --
48 >
49 > I'm assuming that my suddenly starting to have problems with this is
50 > something to do with an update to clamd/clamassassin... I've a vague
51 > recollection that one or the other of them might have been updated when
52 > I last synchronised and emerged updates... but I can't remember.
53 >
54 > Any ideas? This isn't a heavily loaded server usually - I've more
55 > procmail processes than I usually receive in emails in an hour.
56 > Something's wrong - can anyone offer any hints? Has anyone else run
57 > into this problem? Is there a known 'quick fix'?
58
59 Looks like you have 200 processes sitting there blocking I/O. Is there
60 anything related in the logs?
61
62 Your best bet is to examine emerge.log (better still - genlop) and find all
63 recent upgrades that might affect this. Then roll them back one by one till
64 the problem goes away. Once you know the errant package, we can start to
65 examine diffs and see why it might behave like that.
66
67 --
68 alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] Insane load on gentoo server - possibly clamassassin related? Steve <gentoo_sjh@×××××××.uk>