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From: "Rajesh Kumar Mallah." <mallah@trade-india.com>
Organization: Infocom Network Limited.
To: Denis <denis@startsiden.no>, pgsql-sql@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: Further info : Very high load average but no cpu utilization ?
Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 18:56:14 +0530
References: <200205111007.47338.mallah@trade-india.com>
	<200205131734.12619.mallah@trade-india.com>
	<200205231018.17962.denis@startsiden.no>
In-Reply-To: <200205231018.17962.denis@startsiden.no>
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Message-Id: <200205231856.14968.mallah@trade-india.com>

Hi Dennis,

thanks for your interest and i like  your=20
idea of "Better care before later....."

I feel the best care you can take before its late is is
to monitor the sever , what is happening and when.

basic parameters like load average , iostat do reveal if
anything going fishy.

In my case i do have an heavly loaded webserver, but i do not
feel it was the load that brought the server to its toes.

its more of mismangement on my part. I do not have documented which=20
all programs  run and when , how much do they load may be
some wicked script running a query that would never finish etc etc,

its not that everytime my server crashed in unexplained manner.
eg at one time i had redirected the postmaster log to a file which
ran out of sapce!.

I feel If you are concerned abt sever health  you should install
softwares like sysstat to monitor various system paramenters at=20
various time , plot charts etc, and analyze .


my  postmaster is cool now  running for quite sometime without getting wild.

I have got sar installed on my system and now a days
writing a GD cgi application to closely monitor
whats happending to system and when.


i have replied your other questions point wise below:

On Thursday 23 May 2002 01:48 pm, Denis wrote:

> I've been reading this thread with interest, may I ask a few additional
> questions ?
>
> - What version of postgresql are you running, compiled from tarball source
> or RPM version ?


- Is there any good reason to still run this server on a RedHat 6.2 (non
 supported platform from RedHat) ?

not many , it costs bucks to upgrade becoz my server and ISP are in US=20
and i do not have physical access and not too interested to give my
ISP $$$.


 - How large are your databases, and how much usage do you have ?

not very large $PGDATA is betweeb 1.5 GB to 2.0 GB

> - What kinds of API's do you use to interface ?
> - Is the application running locally or do you use IP connections remotely
> ?

Perl DBI , remote ip connections but in same network.


>
> Reason I am asking is that I still have never had postgresql go bad like
> that.. I can always stop it properly, and to this date have had very few
> problems with postgresql itself. I am interested in your problems because
> I'd like to be aware of issues I can eventually run into.. (Better care
> before than later ? :-)

Even I did not have problems for months together.=20
And I feel there is/was a hardrive problem.=20

In my plots even now i see very high peaks at times=20
and i am still to investigate into it.


> My own configuration is like this :
>
> - Postgresql 7.1.3 with OpenFTS, both compiled from source tarballs
> - Debian Linux 2.2.x platform

I too  used OpenFTS till recently but migrated to contrib/tsearch now.
Hey upgrade to PG 7.2.1  its *really* worth it. read the release notes.


> - PHP and Perl applications accessing postgresql from remote machines via
> IP - Not very large databases (100s of MBs) but very frequent read, and
> quite frequent insert / update activity

>
> For the record, server uptime now is equal to the last time I rebooted for
> a kernel recompilation, and during that time I have been forced to restart
> postgresql only because of hangups on the Application servers (apache w.
> php / perl) ..
>
> Regards

--=20
Rajesh Kumar Mallah,
Project Manager (Development)
Infocom Network Limited, New Delhi
phone: +91(11)6152172 (221) (L) ,9811255597 (M)

Visit http://www.trade-india.com ,
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