Processor utilization grows over months of use?
-
I just looked at the processor utilization of my pfsense box and was shocked to see the "nice" utilization had grown to be about 40-50% of my CPU. I have a Via-based pfSense box that does modest OpenVPN duty. The RRD graph shows it went from about 1-3% utilization to the 50% level over a period of months. I rebooted the box and it fell back to the 1-3% level.
Any ideas what's going on?
-
What would have been interesting was to see what process was utilizing the CPU, via top or similar.
Could have been a hung process of some sorts.
-
What would have been interesting was to see what process was utilizing the CPU, via top or similar.
Actually, I looked for that. When I logged in via SSH, tho, I did not see the utilization shown on the graph. I did see an instance of sh which was "niced" and it was showing something like 10% utilization, but that was probably my SSH session.
I should mention that at no time did I suspect anything was wrong because my pfSense box was routing with no perceived degradation. I only became nervous when I saw the RRD graph and rebooted the box. It's now averaging 0.13% nice, 1% system, 0.25% user, and 0.62% interrupt.
-
From the console, try:
top -SH
Instead of just top. That will show system threads and kernel threads.
-
From the console, try:
top -SH
Instead of just top. That will show system threads and kernel threads.
Good to know. I'll try that in a few months if it happens again.
-
-
I'm seeing this again on my Nokia ip330 running 1.2.3 nanobsd with no noticeable performance degradation.
top -SH output:
last pid: 3198; load averages: 0.97, 0.56, 0.42 up 17+14:10:30 11:08:10 82 processes: 3 running, 63 sleeping, 2 zombie, 14 waiting CPU: 0.4% user, 32.7% nice, 21.5% system, 1.8% interrupt, 43.5% idle Mem: 40M Active, 19M Inact, 32M Wired, 72K Cache, 32M Buf, 147M Free Swap: PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND 10 root 171 ki31 0K 8K RUN 381.1H 61.96% idle 9477 root 8 20 6564K 4896K wait 175:35 3.96% sh 31 root -68 - 0K 8K WAIT 121:58 0.00% irq5: fxp2 12 root -32 - 0K 8K RUN 63:02 0.00% swi4: clock sio 29 root -68 - 0K 8K WAIT 48:17 0.00% irq10: fxp0 9615 nobody 64 20 3156K 1232K select 44:17 0.00% apinger 14 root -16 - 0K 8K - 18:31 0.00% yarrow 944 nobody 44 0 3156K 1336K select 11:55 0.00% dnsmasq 30 root -68 - 0K 8K WAIT 11:22 0.00% irq12: fxp1 1362 dhcpd 44 0 3156K 2164K select 10:51 0.00% dhcpd 56 root -8 - 0K 8K mdwait 10:29 0.00% md1 14573 root 44 0 3524K 1868K RUN 5:12 0.00% top 828 root 4 0 5144K 2952K kqread 3:35 0.00% lighttpd 5 root -8 - 0K 8K - 3:24 0.00% g_down 3 root -8 - 0K 8K - 3:22 0.00% g_event 8 root 8 - 0K 8K - 3:19 0.00% thread taskq