Greetings all;
Fedora 10 install, pretty well upto date, quad core phenom 9550, 4GB ram, kernel 2.6.30-rc2. Uptime is about 6 days.
I noticed my machine was lagging badly, so I took a look with htop, and
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/shared/onlyservice init
is using 99% of a core (4 core machine) and /dev/sda3 is showing about a 15Meg/sec continuous read operation. This has been going on for at least an hour.
What is it doing?
And why?
Thanks.
On Tuesday 21 April 2009 09:28:54 Gene Heskett wrote:
I noticed my machine was lagging badly, so I took a look with htop, and
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/shared/onlyservice init
is using 99% of a core (4 core machine) and /dev/sda3 is showing about a 15Meg/sec continuous read operation. This has been going on for at least an hour.
What is it doing?
It's scanning a log file for messages from `init'. I guess you have a *very* large log file that it is reading. (Take a look at the Perl script /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/shared/onlyservice . It's just matching on one of several different Perl regular expressions that include the string `init'.)
I see that the Perl regular expressions are suboptimal in that the quantifier `*' seems to be used in several places where it should be `+'. This consumes more CPU than necessary.
And why?
Because the logwatch program runs periodically to summarize "interesting" log messages.
On Tuesday 21 April 2009, Garry T. Williams wrote:
On Tuesday 21 April 2009 09:28:54 Gene Heskett wrote:
I noticed my machine was lagging badly, so I took a look with htop, and
/usr/bin/perl /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/shared/onlyservice init
is using 99% of a core (4 core machine) and /dev/sda3 is showing about a 15Meg/sec continuous read operation. This has been going on for at least an hour.
What is it doing?
It's scanning a log file for messages from `init'. I guess you have a *very* large log file that it is reading. (Take a look at the Perl script /usr/share/logwatch/scripts/shared/onlyservice . It's just matching on one of several different Perl regular expressions that include the string `init'.)
I see that the Perl regular expressions are suboptimal in that the quantifier `*' seems to be used in several places where it should be `+'. This consumes more CPU than necessary.
And why?
Because the logwatch program runs periodically to summarize "interesting" log messages.
And I lost a hard drive yesterday, but running e2fsck -c -c -y /dev/sdd1, starting about 9 am Sunday morning. The drive ran out of spare blocks, and is now invisible, no response. And it generated about a 1.7 gigabyte messages file with the errors as it was expiring. A 1 TG Maxtor drive of course.
So that would explain that.
Should that bit of perl be patched as you noted?
-- Garry T. Williams --- +1 678 656-4579