esxi - high system cpu load

[David Cornejo]

On Mon, Jan 7, 2013 at 12:46 PM, Chrysostomos Kanoulis <kach at gmx.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> The following output is from a virtual machine on ESXi 4.1.
> I am experiencing high system cpu loads whenever i try to compile anything,
> making it difficult to even update the system.
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> root at lab:~ # uname -a
> FreeBSD lab.local 10.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT #0: Sun Dec 30
> 10:45:18 UTC 2012     root at snap.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/i386.i386/usr/src/sys/GENERIC
>  i386
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> root at lab:~ # top
> last pid: 45416;  load averages:  1.10,  1.08,  1.08
>
>                   up 1+23:24:19  22:06:25
> 36 processes:  2 running, 34 sleeping
> CPU: 12.2% user,  0.0% nice, 87.8% system,  0.0% interrupt,  0.0% idle
> Mem: 273M Active, 62M Inact, 109M Wired, 11M Cache, 59M Buf, 27M Free
> Swap: 819M Total, 8996K Used, 810M Free, 1% Inuse
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> root at lab:~ # vmstat 1
>  procs      memory      page                    disks     faults
> cpu
>  r b w     avm    fre   flt  re  pi  po    fr  sr da0 cd0   in   sy   cs
> us sy id
>  1 0 0    398M    37M   325   0   0   0   334   2   0   0    3   69  149
>  0  4 96
>  1 0 0    398M    37M  5195   0   2   0  5318   0   2   0    7 1335  163
> 47 53  0
>  1 1 0    373M    37M  5374   0   0   0  5337   0   0   0    7 1395  157
> 45 55  0
>  1 0 0    394M    39M 10096   0   0   0 10724   0   0   0    7  965  198
>  4 96  0
>  1 0 0    408M    30M  7602   0   1   0  5347   0   1   0    4 1630  150
> 32 68  0
>  1 0 0    354M    54M  6540   0   0   0 12687   0   0   0    5 1206  162
> 26 74  0
>  1 0 0    409M    26M 10452   0   2   0  3373   0   3   0    9 1592  208
> 10 90  0
>  1 0 0    398M    34M  4184   0   1   0  6316   0   2   0    5  929  153
> 52 48  0
>  1 0 0    369M    41M  3637   0   0   0  5337   0   0   0    5 1371  152
> 54 46  0
>  2 0 0    362M    42M 10285   0   0   0 10710   0   0   0    6  959  185
>  5 95  0
>
> Any suggestions ?
>

A load of 1.10 isn't very high, maybe some output while you're compiling
might help?

It looks like you've got approximately 512M of RAM - I can think of a lot
of code that would really stress that these days, but you don't say what
you're compiling.  You included the top and vmstat output which would
indicate that you're already thinking this way.

Also, ESXi 4.1 is pretty old - I know latest FreeBSD really has problems on
old VMWare workstation, so there might be a problem there too.