2.1 CPU usage
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I upgraded to 2.1 today and the updates are very nice. However, the first thing I noticed was my CPU usage on my ALIX board seems to go pretty high for doing almost nothing. Previously, a little traffic barely made it spike. Now, any kind of activity seems to send it over 50% easily.
Anyone else see this?
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I'm beginning to think that people using Alix should backup their settings, wipe their drives/cards, reinstall cleanly and restore settings if possible.
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It's a long time since I had a 2.0.3 system running for real, so I can't compare. But, my experience is when an "event" happens (a WAN or OpenVPN link goes down/up) a lot of processing happens and it takes "quite a while" for the system to process it all - often the CPU shows 100% (or close to it) for a couple of 10 second refresh cycles of the dashboard widget. When the links are all stable, and 1 or 2 Mbps of traffic is flowing, then the CPU is back down very low (like 5%).
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cpu usage shown in the webconfig is off in 2.1
usage is shown is cli is much lower for me -
I have the same issue here… not just a CPU problem... but Memory too...
I'm trying to find some solution to that...
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I'm beginning to think that people using Alix should backup their settings, wipe their drives/cards, reinstall cleanly and restore settings if possible.
After some updates with Alix, i agree with that!
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Give yourself to the Dark Side. It is the only way you can save your pfsense. Just wipe and reinstall… :P
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That doesn't really make much sense for NanoBSD. Each update is essentially a fresh install, bar the settings from config.xml, the RRD data, the DHCP leases, and a very small number of other things that are carried over such as loader.conf.local.
A wipe+reload can help with update issues, or maybe issues on a full install, but NanoBSD isn't helped so much by it for general issues such as this.
For the CPU issue, from the shell, run:
top -aSHAnd see what is consuming all of your CPU when it's busy.
Memory is tight on ALIX, always has been, so that is easier to understand.
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What I've seen is that the seriously competent can do ok. They can go in on the command line and make the changes they need to get things going but for the not so amazingly command line savy, I just don't see the upside of struggling with a broken upgrade? (If it breaks during upgrade, which it did for many people). Unless the install is very customized or loss of RRD data is a big deal, a reinstall seems like such a simple thing.
I don't know. It just seems too easy to start from fresh.
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For a full install, sure, but not NanoBSD.
You'd get essentially the same effect of a fresh install by uninstalling all packages and forcing a firmware upgrade to the version you already have.
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The difference being that you don't actually have to go through the upgrade process which is what seems to be giving trouble for some. Uninstalling all your packages first would probably do it but keeping your packages is really one of the biggest reasons for upgrading rather than installing clean. I fully appreciate that with Nano you're just swapping to the new clean slice anyway.
My own home Nano box failed to update cleanly whilst reinstalling packages and even now it's still failing to backup the RRD data each night. I need to experiment with the size of /var.
I realise that the size of the rrd data files is fixed but does it perhaps compress to a greater dergree with less data in it? With the existing size of /var and /tmp do we have any idea what the maximum number of interfaces RRD data is that can be backed up?Steve
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Just updating this to say that I increased /var to 80MB and haven't had an issue since.
Steve
