Completely Idle server is maxed out!

[geekgod]

Hello!

I'm running Zimbra on CentOS inside VMWare. The guest operating system has 768 megs dedicated to it.

For some reason even with a completely idle server the box is way too active:
top - 05:18:52 up 3:55, 2 users, load average: 0.84, 1.02, 1.01
Tasks: 93 total, 2 running, 91 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0% us, 2.9% sy, 0.0% ni, 95.2% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 1.8% si
Mem: 775776k total, 698040k used, 77736k free, 46652k buffers
Swap: 524280k total, 0k used, 524280k free, 370344k cached

Java gets run every 30 seconds or so, perl is run every 30 seconds or so. I would love to run this on our vmware server farm but this load for 0 users is quite excessive. Can anyone shed some light on why these processes are running so often on a completely idle server?

Thanks!

[KevinH]

Those stats show 95.2% idle.... So I think you may be reading the stats wrong. Can you confirm that the stats below are an attempt to show a loaded server.

[geekgod]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Those stats show 95.2% idle.... So I think you may be reading the stats wrong. Can you confirm that the stats below are an attempt to show a loaded server.

In the host operating system (windows xp) the machine stays at 100% cpu every 5-15 seconds. Every time java runs (every 15 - 20 seconds) the CPU usage goes through the roof. Does java need to run this often? If so, why not keep it resident?

[KevinH]

Well that may just be something with the virtual server. We don't reccomend running Zimbra under a virtual machine. Java is resident; Tomcat (running under java) will run periodic cleanups and idle session/thread checks. These may cause some CPU usage, but we've never seen this take up more than a percent or two of CPU when idle. This of course is on a normal install. We don't test under a virtual machine.

[anand]

he maybe seeing CPU spike because of zmmon, the watchdog script. We are working on fixing this.

[geekgod]

I am seeing a spike with the following scripts/binaries that runs about every 10 seconds:

zimbra 20472 7.0 0.1 5536 1092 ? S 19:40 0:00 /bin/bash /opt/zimbra/bin/zmjava com.zimbra.cs.account.ProvUtil gs zimbra.domain.com

zimbra 20510 0.0 0.7 258536 7496 ? Rl 19:40 0:00 /opt/zimbra/java/bin/java -client -Dzimbra.home=/opt/zimbra -cp /opt/zimbra/lib/zimbrastore.jar:/opt/zimbra/lib/commons-logging.jar:/opt/zimbra/lib/commons-cli-2.0.jar:/opt/zimbra/lib/dom4j-1.5.jar:/opt/zimbra/lib/log4j-1.2.8.jar:/opt/zimbra/lib/commons-httpclient-2.0.1.jar com.zimbra.cs.localconfig.Main -q -m shell zimbra_home zimbra_java_home

I have since installed on a normal PC and it has the same behavior. Are these the known scripts with problems? If not, why are these running so often?

Thanks again and my hats off to the devel team. Zimbra is awesome!