collectinfo.pl & yum causing 100% CPU usage on EC2 instance

6 posts / 0 new
Last post
#1 Tue, 04/26/2011 - 17:46
eddieb

collectinfo.pl & yum causing 100% CPU usage on EC2 instance

hello

i had been receiving alerts from my amazon instance where the CPU usage would spike to 100% and remain at that for a while. I monitored this for a few days and there is absolutely no regular pattern to these spikes, so they are not, at least directly, caused by a cron job.

top (ordered by TIME+) shows that yum gets stuck and runs for 15 to 30 minutes using 10 to 15% of RAM . I suspect that yum is being started by collectinfo.pl. I am attaching the output of pstree -l -p.

i already set /etc/webmin/virtual-server/collectinfo.pl to run only once a day, but I would like to know why do I have this problem when yum runs fine when I run it on demand.

  • Amazon EC2 micro instance (617mb RAM)
  • CentOS 5.6
  • Virtualmin 3.84.gpl
  • Webmin 1.540

Thanks.

Tue, 04/26/2011 - 18:05
andreychek

That's odd that it would get stuck... however, perhaps you may want to decrease how often collectinfo.pl runs.

You can tweak that by going into System Settings -> Virtualmin Config -> Status Collection, and set "Interval between status collection job runs".

-Eric

Tue, 04/26/2011 - 18:14 (Reply to #2)
eddieb

ok, i now have two questions:

A) whats the difference of configuring this via "Scheduled Cron Jobs" and "Background Status Collection" ?

B) i had already changed it via the former before you replied. when i try to change it via the latter i get a simple page saying "error" if I try to change it to anything greater than 60 minutes. is this behavior by default?

thanks

Tue, 04/26/2011 - 18:28
andreychek

Hmm, I'm honestly not sure why it cares how frequently that runs, it's just for the graphs and statistics.

The only problem with changing just the cronjob (option #1) is that after an upgrade, it's possible it could get reset to whatever was set in the status collection (option #2).

That's easily solvable by just changing the cronjob again though.

-Eric

Mon, 05/02/2011 - 09:08
eddieb

ok, i can "live" with it now, but the problem is not solved. when I log into webmin and it tries to "refresh sytem information" the same thing occurs... yum gets stuck, using a lot of memory and all of the CPU available. the entire system becomes unusable until I "kill -9 yumpid" (regular kill wont do)

Mon, 05/02/2011 - 09:37
andreychek

Doing some digging, I see there's an option to turn off package update collection. You can do that at System Settings -> Virtualmin Configuration -> Status Collection -> Collect all available package updates.

With that, you'd need to manually check to see if there's package updates, but it may save you some CPU time.

-Eric

Topic locked