Very Computer

Anyone seen this? We have a 630 running Sol 2.2 and every 15 minutes,
the load average runs up to 8 or 9, yet, at this instance, only 1 or
runnable processes are visible with top or ps. I suspect something is
forking off numerous copies of itself that quickly die, quicker than
top or ps can see them. We have older versions of the "usual" patches
installed.

I know what I ought to do is upgrade to 2.3, but if anyone else
has seen this I'd like to know if they found a reason.

-w

--
"There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that all employees are
going to be required to have lobotomies . . . at least at the
prices we were quoted."                                 -Dilbert

Turns out the culprits were users more or less continuously running
giant finds out of cron files on clients of the server. Ecch. What a mess.
I used nfsstat -s and saw the server was doing 90% readlinks.
On behalf of the users, I rewrote their script so it wouldn't work
unless it was run by root on the server. ;-)

There was a kind of resonant effect as different users' scripts
"peaked" every 15 min.
-w
--
"There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that all employees are
going to be required to have lobotomies . . . at least at the
prices we were quoted."                                 -Dilbert