Today we have been off the network from early in the morning until 16:30 local
time. Nevertheless, LISTSERV managed to eat 45 minutes of CPU time and to
generate 167000 lines of punch output. Unfortunately part of this output is
for local printers, so I can't know exactly how much network traffic was
generated. What is sure is that we received 178 files today and transmitted
842, of which 803 came from LISTSERV or MAILER (but then MAILER also handles
mail from local users, so I don't know the exact proportion). Guess what list
generated 80% of this traffic?
At the risk of sounding like I am being unfair to INFO-VAX, I have to inform
you that our management is very worried about the resource usage of our
LISTSERV, which they see as "spending most of its time processing junk from
the network that our institution is not even interested in". I can understand
their concern, though: today our poor 1.5 Mips machine was so saturated that
its expansion factor went up to 29, with 21 users in Q2, 13 in Q1, and a page
steal rate of 65% (in other words, it took 10 seconds to get to the next page
when pressing the PF8 key). This isn't due to LISTSERV of course, but it's
much more difficult to justify CPU usage when the machine is oversaturated.
Anyway: I have, a few weeks ago, altered the link weights file to reduce to a
minimum the load on FRMOP22-CEARN, even though it meant extra traffic on
FRMOP22-FRORS12 and FRORS12-FRECP11. If the situation doesn't change shortly
(ie if LISTSERV keeps eating 45 minutes of CPU a day), I will have to change
the tables before the end of next week so that we no longer process traffic
not destined to us. This means that traffic would flow directly from
LISTSERV@CEARN to LISTSERV@ICNUCEVM, LISTSERV@BITNIC, LISTSERV@EB0UB011, etc.
Under normal conditions I would have fought the case with our management,
mentioning the prestige of nodeid FRECP11 and suchlike, but this has become
impossible since I am leaving this place in a few months and they are
considering getting rid of all the garbage I have written or installed, RSCS
security mods, LISTSERV, MAILER and RELAY included (well, that's what they
say, maybe they're just trying to frighten me which is stupid but nevermind
:-) ).
In any case there's not much I can do, and what little I can will last at best
3 months. So we should be looking for solutions to this problem before we're
in trouble.
Eric
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