Am Sonntag, den 17.02.2008, 00:56 +0200 schrieb jamez:
[...]
> There're no others services on the box, "top" shows no processes using more
> then 0% CPU. us/sy/ni/wa/hi/si/st stats are all low, CPU idle is almost
> 100%... and it doesn't metter is exim4 running or not! The only thing
> changes when i do "/etc/init.d/exim4 start" - top's load average goes to
> 50+, usually ~100 in few seconds. "ps -e|grep exim|wc -l" shows 50-300
> (runnig exim4 processes). System remains stable and responsible as with load
> avg <1 (before firing exim4).
I think you should have asked earlier. Everything regarding your
system-configuration sounds desparate (not to say: mad) and should be
undone ASAP. Seriously.
Load is basically a value indicating the number of processes that would
like to continue but are waiting for something. I've seen extreme load
when I had all my exim-data on a NFS-server which suddenly developed
latencies. Or when spamassassin hat too many processes competing for the
same lock-file (using "lockmethod nfssafe", the problem disappeared when
changing it to "lockmethod flock").
I'm just guessing, since you provide no valuable information.
But I'd first check for network-issues, especially DNS. Check that no
blacklist is offline or something like that.
Then I'd check for lock-contention e.g. regarding the exim-hints-dbs.
I'd consider deleting them to see if there is a broken db-file.
Later I'd considere wheter you accidently missed some information and
there are additional processes like spamd, nscd, etc. which might cause
problems when seeing load.
--
CU,
Patrick.
