I have recently noticed a weird thing happening on a server that I have. 
A few times a day, the drives on my server start thrashing, like they are
doing a massive read or write.  If I look at TOP while this is happening
the only thing that really shows active CPU cycles is sendmail.  It uses
about 8% of the processing power of the box.  After about 10 minutes, the
thrashing stops and that sendmail thread stops (user smmsp).  During the
thrashing there isn't any noticeable performance slowdown.

The Box...
IBM Netserver 5000
2 GB RAM
Dual PIII 550
3x18 gb hot-swap scsi drives (RAID 5)
Redhat 9.0 (with all of the latest RedHat up2date updates)
Sendmail 8.12.8-6.90

Anyone have any ideas on what my be causing this?

--
Jim Streit
Partner & Co-Founder
NorthLANs Alliance, LLC
JimStreit at northlans.com




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