From: duncan@yc.estec.esa.nl (Duncan Gibson)
Subject: Re: Mysterious load on HP9000/730
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 09:08:42 GMT
Organization: ESTEC/YCV, Noordwijk, The Netherlands

I will re-state the problem, summarise the responses, and then tell you
the current status...

In article <1992Sep3.064444.21989@yc.estec.esa.nl> I wrote:
>I have noticed a mysterious quirk of one of our system which is not
>serious, but which I am curious about. (So I havn't called the CRC).
>
>We have several HP systems, one of which is an HP9000/730 (SRX?) and is
>used mainly for an achitectural CAD package. In general, there are only
>one or two users who connect to this machine, most users have an XDM
>session running elsewhere. In order to keep ahead of the users, I have 
>xmeter running, monitoring the load on the various machines. Every now
>and again (at least once a day?) the xmeter shows the 730 as having a
>constant load of 1.0 (yesterday it was 2.0 and later on there was a case
>of 3.0) and this lasts for several (tens of) minutes. However, when I
>then login to the machine to check it out, quite often there is no-one
>else logged in anyway, and usually there are no obvious busy processes.
>The machine never seems to be unduly sluggish, so this doesn't appear to
>be the "real" load, just a "phantom" load (cf. phantom pregnancy? :-)
>
>...
>
>P.S. The machine does not contain any users home directories, and in fact
>     none of the disks are NFS mounted by other machines. Uname -a gives:
>
>        HP-UX yc9 A.B8.05 A 9000/730 927406132

I had the following responses of "we have/had this problem too":

Josef Nelissen   <jonas@beor.informatik.rwth-aachen.de> 720
Anssi Lensu      <Anssi.Lensu@lut.fi>                   710
David W. Barts   <davidb@zeus.ce.washington.edu>        300 HPUX 6.5 (really!)
John Sullivan    <sullivan%interex@relay.EU.net>        705
Mark D. Anderson <anderson@eos.aps.anl.gov>             730
Morten G. Jensen <mgj@ktas.dk>                          730 and 720
Umberto D'Ortona <umberto@aomc.jussieu.fr>              730 HPUX 8.05
Hugh C. Lauer    <lauer@merl.com>
Mike de Laine    <mike@roads.sa.gov.au>                 710

Two responses containing suggestions on what to do:

Erik van Bronkhorst <erik@peewee.nwc.navy.mil> said:
    "Turn on your accounting software and all will become obvious"
    [I didn't so I don't know whether it does :-) ]

Maxwell Maklin <maklinm@cognos.COM> said:
    "There was a number of problems in the 8.05 that warranted a new
    release HP-UX 8.07 for the 700s.  One possible cause could be a memory
    leak on the X server, others could be some probs with swapping, still
    others could be with the well known vfork() call.  I have a list back
    at the office of patches, but I recommend you upgrade to 8.07 as soon
    as possible, if not to fix your current probs, but to get to use stuff
    like automounter and disk striping."

But here is what actually happened:

I have been struggling to port a Startbase application. It used to run
on a 835 with HPUX7.0 and used window smart programs using the sox11
driver for display on X-terminals, but used the hp98731 device in RAW mode
when using the colsole graphics terminal. I've been trying to port it to
run on a 730 running HPUX8.05, and trying to use the hp98766 device in
RAW mode. I was struggling to find out why the SBDL routines never
returned a hit when I tried to pick something, even if I set the pick
window to be the whole of the VDC! So at this point I contacted the
Dutch CRC (Call number E2593375) and Tom Fransen sent me a patch for
Starbase (PHSS_1354: fix for DI polyhedron_with_data problem) that also
covered a picking problem as well. However, the patch needs to be
installed on top of HPUX 8.07, so I had to upgrade the system before I
could apply the patch. My picking problems went away (after a little bit
more work on my program).

So the upshot of all of this is that a) I didn't turn accounting on so I
don't know if that shows what was actually happening, and b) I installed
the upgrade to HPUX 8.07 so that I could work on something else.

In the week since the upgrade to 8.07 I have not noticed the phantom
load (but I think that it has gone). So my advice is to upgrade to 8.07.

Cheers
Duncan

PS. The strange thing about all of this is that we have a 750 running
    8.05 and I have never noticed this phantom load at all! But that one
    will be upgraded this weekend too...
-- 
Duncan Gibson, ESTEC/YCV, Postbus 299, 2200AG Noordwijk, The Netherlands
Preferred email:  duncan@yc.estec.esa.nl    or  ...!sun4nl!esatst!duncan
Desperate email:  dgibson@estec.esa.nl      or  dgibson@ESTEC.BITNET
Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp