Re: Need Help Diagnosing Server Wierdness

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Author: Matt Graham
Date:  
To: Main PLUG discussion list
Subject: Re: Need Help Diagnosing Server Wierdness
From: Mark Phillips
> I have an old headless server running Linux kernel 2.6.32, Debian
> Squeeze. Recently, when I log in using ssh the terminal window freezes
> for a few seconds, then usually comes back. The command line stops
> printing the characters I am typing, the cursor stops blinking, and
> then after a few seconds, it comes back. This happens every few
> minutes


> # df -h
> /dev/sda1             182G   42G  131G  25% /
> /dev/sdb1             230G  146G   72G  67% /mnt/sdb

>
> How should I go about diagnosing this problem?


If it keeps happening on a semi-regular schedule, and the server's old/slow,
it may due to disk I/O. Have a look in dmesg for anything relating to
read/write errors on a disk.

Or it's a process that's regularly showing up, doing something that blocks
everything (not sure what), and then going away again. You could try to
capture this by doing "top -b -n 50 > toplog.txt", which will run top in batch
mode 50 times (~100 seconds wallclock), so you can then have a look at the
file later and look at which processes are running when the machine freezes.

--
Matt G / Dances With Crows
The Crow202 Blog: http://crow202.org/wordpress/
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see

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