[Box Backup] Housekeeping hogging the server

[Ben Summers]

On 25 Oct 2006, at 16:02, Jamie Neil wrote:

> Ben Summers wrote:
>>
>> On 25 Oct 2006, at 13:53, Jamie Neil wrote:
>>
>> However, I don't think the server should be using quite so much CPU.
>> Mostly it'll be waiting for I/O. Could it be another of those lovely
>> Linux and hardware disagreements?
>
> It's possible, but it's running on hardware that we've had no problems
> with in the past and it's actually a Xen guest so it's insulated to  
> from
> the hardware to some degree.
>
> Now that I've removed the mail server account the CPU is right back  
> down
> to idle.

On review of the code, I don't think thousands of entries in a  
directory is going to cause problems with housekeeping. It should  
scale roughly linearly with the number of directories in an account.  
The client is another matter, but even then, it should be pretty fast  
as the really slow code was improved several versions ago -- I note  
you only reported problems with the server.

I therefore suspect that something else is happening here. If you  
could run a disc benchmark on the guest and the hardware on it's own,  
I think that would be a useful start to finding out what the problem is.

How much data is stored in the other accounts?

Ben