OT: Unix stutter

[John Esak]

>
> In that case it could be just swapping and flushing cache. There
> have been instances where someone tunes something thinking it will
> make it faster but it causes huge pauses.  This will be allocating
> large cache and then when it really has to be flushed the system
> will spend the time doing that - and basically seem to be dead
> during that time.

This is the first time I've heard of this. You're right I never mentioned
the system (this time).  It is a SMP 2 3Ghz CPU"s with 1Gb of RAM. We run
about 50 users, but at night when this problem happens only about 7 or 8 and
only 1 of them is ever doing anything at a time. (meaning no time are two or
three people doing different things. Just one big filePro app running with
6 - 8 users... and the backup. Do you think a system this large and fast
could have this cache clearing freeze up ... because I _do_ have the cache
(nbufs and so on) set as high as they possibly can be. Should I _lower_
these, perhaps?

> You have never mentioned that you have run sar or given any info
> about that.  Have you run it?
>
> Bill

No, I never have run sar. It is so intermittent. I'll set up sar to run,
though during a midnight backup and see what it produces. It is just that
Tune-Up has not really shown anything in the way of huge system hogs other
than Edge itself which pretty much always wins. I don't know how to track
spikes with Tune-Up... maybe I'll call and ask them.

John