On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Waldomiro wrote:
> top - 16:16:30 up 42 days, 13:23, 4 users, load average: 3.13, 3.52, 3.36
> Cpu(s): 1.4%us, 1.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 84.4%id, 12.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
> Mem: 16432240k total, 16344596k used, 87644k free, 27548k buffers
> Swap: 10241428k total, 3680860k used, 6560568k free, 6230376k cached
>
> I'm afraid of two things, one is the "load average", I think 3 is too much
You're at 12.9% waiting for I/O and 84.4% idle. That means your average
load consists of three processes who are stuck waiting for I/O at any
given time. The I/O is what you should be worried about, not the load
average.
> another is the "swap", almost 4GB of swap, I think that is too much
> swap.
It does look like your server is using much more RAM than it actually has,
which is the likely reason for all the disk I/O. If you sort the top
output by memory, you might see why that is.
The information provided by top on Linux isn't very good though; take a
look at /proc/meminfo for more details. Rather than rely on top's math,
instead I usually capture the output from:
ps -e -o pid,rss,vsz,size,user,cmd
And add things up myself instead, taking into account the shared bits each
of the PostgreSQL processes includes.
--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
