plesk is making big load

[AleksandarI]

I have dual quad-core AMD with 8GB RAM and 500GB SATA-II HDD. And when somebody open setup link in Cp in any domain, load is jumping from 5 to 11-15
In same time, process : /opt/psa/admin/bin/usermng --isquotable-quiet is active

Does anybody know what is wrong :S

p.s, my biggest mistake I made this year is taking plesk as CP. I will regreting forever

 

[atomicturtle]

Maybe a disk is going bad? Load is generally a factor of disk IO

 

[AleksandarI]

to be honest, it might be. many things generate huge load, untar even not too big files
mail server when there are more than 100 mails to process.

I will try to check disks, somehow :S

 

[wdriver]

I had a problem which basically sounds the same as yours. It was a bad RAID driver. Are you experiencing large 'wa' % from your cpu?

To check:
ssh in and run:
top

then press '1' to display all cpu's

Then view the 'wa' %

It is it a high figure it can suggest a slow writing to hdd's. (as was my case).

 

[AleksandarI]

yes, wa % is big. Usuallly, it is huge on 3 of 8 CPUs :S

messing with RAID drivers on production server is not too much clever :S

 

[wdriver]

If it is a RAID problem check for updated drivers, the final decision is up to you on how you proceed. Updated drivers were available for me. I had a Dell Poweredge 860 (raid 1).
My solution however was a new server and migrated across (the old server was 3yrs old). I (like you) didn't want to upgrade the RAID drivers with over 500 domains on the server.

To lessen the problem while it was there i changed /var/qmail/control/concurrencylocal setting to:
1

This meant only 1 email was processed at a time. On my server with the raid problem this meant 1 email was processed every 10 seconds. This relieved the stress on the server greatly & let me sleep at night! As email is the main thing that is generally writing larger files to the hdd's. Everything else is mostly reading which i didn't have a problem with.

I hope this helps, i dealt with this problem for 18 months before i finally got rid of the server...