<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 8:13 PM, Alex Carver <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:agcarver+ale@acarver.net" target="_blank">agcarver+ale@acarver.net</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="im">On 8/24/2013 18:03, Ed Cashin wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
On Sat, Aug 24, 2013 at 8:38 PM, Alex Carver <<a href="mailto:agcarver%2Bale@acarver.net" target="_blank">agcarver+ale@acarver.net</a>><u></u>wrote:<br>
...<br>
<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
Well, looks like mostly still working although it has a memory leak<br>
somewhere. The free memory (according to top) is slowly dropping. It went<br>
from 380MB to 365MB in about two hours so 15MB went somewhere during that<br>
time. Probably one of the cron jobs or apache, just don't know which yet.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
If you haven't already, you might check whether that memory is simply being<br>
used to cache stuff. Linux aggressively caches blocks from disk in pages<br>
of memory, which is usually a convenience.<br>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Good point, I'll look at that later and see what's up. Although this has led me to investigate one of my other machines (a P2) to check its drives. The drives are fine, they're just running a bit slow (20MB/s) though I'm not too concerned since it's a low volume mail server (and certainly better than the 200 KB/s I was getting on the troublesome machine).<div class="">
<div class="h5"><br></div></div></blockquote></div><br><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">This wouldn't explain a sudden drop in performance, but make sure you have your partitions mounted using the "relatime" mount option. One unfortunate problem with Linux is that it keeps track of every time a file is accessed, which means that every time you read a file, it causes a write back to the disk.<br>
<br>Older kernels used the "noatime" option, but "relatime" is the modern incarnation of that. The only caveat is if you are using backup software that relies on the access time, which I think is somewhat rare. Using "relatime" should solve those problems though.<br>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br clear="all"><div>❧ Brian Mathis</div>
<br><br></div></div>