A couple of quick questions

[Zorak]

So earlier, I was playing some Tribes 2 ( a great game that is legally free to download and play now, btw), when I started to get MASSIVE frameloss. So, i exited the program and I noticed even GNOME seemed to be lagging (I had compiz turned off). When I went to check out the processor load using the "uptime" command, it said each one had an average load of over 1 ! I have no idea why that was happening, so I looked under "top" , but I couldn't see what was eating up all the processor time. Furthermore, I noticed that when I did "uptime", i got something similar to the following:


zorak@Chaac ~ $ uptime
23:10:38 up 17 min, 2 users, load average: 0.21, 0.15, 0.10

This seems a bit strange to me, seeing as how i have a _QUAD_CORE_ processor, and yet only 3 show up when I run "uptime". I tried checking my logs to see if there was a problem with my processor, but dmesg says the kernel detects my CPUs just fine. Anyone have any ideas what could be going on here?

Thanks.

-Zorak

 

[linux_0]

It may have been IO or swapping.

GL

 

[Zorak]

Shouldn't uptime report the load on all 4 cores though? And also, I can understand frameloss due to a high amount of I/O operations to and from the disk, but I wasn't downloading anything or moving large files or anything of that nature. Furthermore, wouldn't that just stress ONE core (the disk won't write any faster if you have more cores reading/writing). Even then, i didn't think that accessing the disk would cause any core to have a load in excess of 1 on it.

As for swapping, that would only become necessary as the system runs up against the physical memory barrier, but I have 2GB of RAM, and I was only running tribes (and I haven't ever had it swap before while playing tribes). This is all a bit strange, but if I run into the problem again, I will be sure to follow your suggestions.

--Zorak

EDIT: Since I am a newbie when it comes to reading my logs, I am not sure where all the system keeps logs aside from /var/log/syslog*, is there anywhere else that I can look to see if the OS recorded a message of what was going on?

 

[linux_0]

uptime only shows the the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes, it is not aware of the number of CPU cores.

Did you get my PM?

 

[Zorak]

Question: How might I detect whether my machine has been compromised? I was watching a streaming video online and I assume that there was a problem with flash, because it made my entire system (almost) lock up. When I looked at 'uptime' it reported a load of 9! I decided to look in /var/log for any other indications of what might be the problem when I stumbled across the "auth.log" file. It turns out that there have been hundreds of attempts to log onto my machine every day for almost 6 months! Thank god they have all been invalid users, but it makes me wonder whether I have been compromised and what I can do to better protect myself.

I'd really appreciate your help.

-Zorak

 

[linux_0]

PM coming your way