Am Mo, den 19.12.2005 schrieb Chris Mason (Lists) um 22:04:
Yes, top is not showing me any real informaiton and the server is responsive, but the MTA shuts down because it sees such high load. It seems to be fake load, locked up processes. I see a lot of vsftpd processes using ps -x and I cannot kill them. It's very strange. I have several dedicated servers that get hammered all day but I have never seen this before. Even shuting down httpd and mysql does not make any difference, even though they should be the main load. I ahve recently installed MailScanner which usually increases the load tremendously, but I did not see sendmail as the problem, even when I shut down MailScanner, there were no sendmail processes remaining and the load kept climbing. The fact that the server is still responsive is very curious,at 23 it should be very sluggish.
Get a full process list and find the zombies - process state "Z", probably even "D". Yes, they do not really cause CPU usage but increase the load. If it is vsftpd which often dies abnormal you should investigate that further.
Alexander