CCAD Process CPU Usage

[kapow]

First, let me state some assumptions.

There is a process running a branched WEB5 appliance called ccad. This is the counter collection agent process that is used to collect information for the MON appliance. Is this correct?

Next, I have noticed that when this server is not under load, this process consumes nearly 100% of the cpu according to top:


PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2126 root 25 0 18788 1200 880 R 99.9 0.1 2228:44 ccad


Is this to be expected? My srv info command for the server the application is running on states:

--- CPU Information ---
Total CPUs : 4
CPU Type : Dual-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 2218
CPU Frequency : 2593 Hz
CPU Bogomips : 5187
CPU Load : 1.00
Reserved CPUs : 0.00
Free CPUs : 1.30
Allocated CPUs : 2.70

Does this mean the cpu's that are allocated are at 100%? Is this normal? If so, I assume the priority of that process is low.

[PeterNic]

Top and vmstat inside appliance may not give you the correct CPU load -- the appliance is rarely given more CPU than it needs (CPU is released to the server if the appliance has no threads/interrupts ready to run). This way, if the appliance doesn't do anything, then ccad (the counter collection daemon, used to report appliance statistics) is pretty much the only thing that does anything -- collecting stats once a second.

You can inspect the actual CPU load by connecting a MON appliance to the mon output of the appliance, and then configuring the monitoring graph to watch the appliance. (Also, you may use xentop -- a version of top that reports CPU load correctly inside appliances.)

ccad should never use more than a very small fraction of a percent of the CPU of the appliance. If it is hogging the CPU, then this is a bug -- if there are any particular steps you can send us to reproduce the problem (or give us a copy of the appliance which exhibits the problem upon start), please do so via support at 3tera (dot) com.

As a temporary workaround, if you are not using the mon output, you can simply terminate the ccad (or disable it with chkconfig -- the service is applogic_ccad)

Regards,
-- Peter

[kapow]

Thanks, I suspect that this is not an issue as performance seems nominal. 3Tera is already involved through my provider and they have a copy of the application.