5240 Appliance high system load

[elanmbx]

Just wanted to get a feeling of folks' appliance system loads on heavily utilized appliances.  During the main portion of my backup window (lots of tape jobs, lots of VMware to MSDP) I see sustained system loads (per top utility) upwards of 80:

top - 17:46:14 up 26 days, 22:27, 2 users, load average: 88.78, 93.96, 93.47
Tasks: 961 total, 27 running, 934 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 3.7 us, 72.7 sy, 0.0 ni, 4.8 id, 18.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.8 si, 0.0 st

Others see this type of excessive system load?

Am I just asking too much of my appliance?

[Mouse]

Does it do a good job in making backups? If its still doing what is supposed to do, I'd not be worried, this is data mover so it's supposed to be heavily utilized, some may consider it good ROI :)

[elanmbx]

So the performance seems to be... inconsistent.  When the system load is high like that I find that logging into the appliances is problematic, not to mention sometimes it's nearly impossible to override & elevate when the load is extreme.

And I've witnessed duplications slow to a crawl when the system is loaded like this.  I guess what I'm trying to get a feeling for - is when is an appliance overloaded?  Are there telltale signs that you're simply asking the hardware to do too much?

[stucci]

Dear Elanmbx,

on my appliances 5240, NBU version 3.1, I solved some issue of slowness and problem to do an elevate, with customization of the MaxCacheSIze:

to read the setting:
egrep "^MaxCacheSize" /msdp/data/dp1/pdvol/etc/puredisk/contentrouter.cfg
to change it:
egrep "^MaxCacheSize" /msdp/data/dp1/pdvol/etc/puredisk/contentrouter.cfg

On new appliance this value is already setted to "50%", but if you upgraded the machine the value is not upgraded in automatic, so I solved setting it manually.

regards

[elanmbx]

Interestingly, this was a recommendation per support for my appliance to get the swap use under control... oddly, it didn't seem to help.  I'm not even sure how to tell if this setting is being used - I thought it would affect the amount of memory that spoold used, but on this particular appliance, it doesn't seem to have that effect:

99326 root 20 0 95.635g 0.075t 3604 S 0.0 60.8 4428:04 spoold