swlist very slow.

[brian_31]

Hi Team:

On one of my nclass box swlist response is very very slow. It takes a long time before returning the result. Any pointers? Env. 11.0,latest patches(march 02), 20 G ram. But only this box is slow there are 3 other similar config. boxes and all of them are fast. Any clue...

Thanks
Brian.

[Hai Nguyen_1]

Brian,

Normally, swlist's slow response has something to do with name resolution. Can you compare /etc/nsswitch.conf, /etc/resolv.conf on all boxes and see if you find any difference?

Hai

[S.K. Chan]

Sounds like a possible hostname resolution problem. But before that you might want to try/check a few things ..
1) The logs (syslog.log,swagent.log,swinstall.log). Do you see anything "abnormal".
2) Restart "swagentd" to see if it helps.
If the above does not help, can't find anything wrong, then check for possible wrong entries related to the hostname resolution. For example ..
/etc/hosts
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/nsswitch.conf
Does "nslookup" on both the hostname and IP address gives any error ?

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Brian

if nslookup comes up with a unkown host name
cd /etc
mv resolv.conf abc.conf
ps -aef | grep swage
kill -9 PID
/sbin/init.d/swagentd -r


then do a swlist.


Manoj Srivastava

[brian_31]

Hi:
Okay. It is not always slow. There is no difference in all the resolver config files. But sometimes swlist really is very very slow. I am comparing 3 boxes of similar config. I did find out in one of the boxes which was ok there was a $before the namserver name in resolv.conf instead of #. Will that be an issue? But anyway that is on the other box on which swlist is not slow. Any thoughts??
Thanks
Brian.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Sound slike you might have a corruption in your IPD (installed products db for Software Distributor).

Try running /usr/contrib/bin/check_patches
on all your servers and compare output - are there a lot more problems reported on your occassionally slow server ?

[Sajid_1]

Did you check the log files under /var/adm/sw directory ? Try retstarting the swagentd daemon:
# /sbin/init.d/swagentd stop
# /sbin/init.d/swagentd start

Check the network traffic or errors while it's running slow. You may check the syslog file too.

[Martin Johnson]

do a "nslookup" of the host name and see how long it takes to respond. If it takes a long time, you have a name resolution problem.

HTH
Marty

[brian_31]

Hi:

Thanks. check_patches was a good idea but i am not sure how it would impact swlist. Can you pl. explain. As far as nslookup it is the same way as swlist. nslookup takes a very long time to resolve sometimes but not always.

Thanks
Brian.

[Cheryl Griffin]

check_patches would help only if the slowness is due to a patch problem. It can be used in place of trying to fix this with:
# swconfig \*
(which may also take a long time)

Stick with looking at a hostname resolution problem. This should be the underlying problem.
# nslookup hostname_here
# nslookup ip_address_here

Check /etc/resolv.conf. (If this exists, try moving it out of the way momentarily and run swlist again. See any improvement?)
Verify the entries in /etc/hosts.
How do you resolve names? Check it as well.

Cheryl

[Stefan Farrelly]

If you run swlist it goes off to the /var/adm/sw/products directory and looks through the catalog files for all installed products and patches to report back to you the output you want to see.

So, if you have a corruption in there - some files/products corrupted, not installed properly or whatever then swlist is going to have trouble working out what to report - and thus take a while to display any output back to you.

So, check_patches is designed to do the same thing - go through in detail all installed products and patches and verify for you that theyre all installed properly - no corruptions, stuff not installed properly etc. So if you have an IPD corruption - check_patches will report lots of errors. On a nice clean system check_patches should only report a couple of minor swverify errors - or even better none at all! (thats the goal anyway).

[S.K. Chan]

Maybe it's not name resolution problem then. "Occasional" event is always hard to pinpoint its root cause.. anyway can you check the state of your patches ..
# swlist -l fileset -a state
==> Are all patches configured ?

[brian_31]

Yes. All the patches are in configured state. Also since this is very slow occasionally i really doubt about the corrupted IPD 'coz then swlist should always be slow is it not?

Thanks
Brian.

[David Bell_1]

Brian,

Take a look at patch number PHCO_25875:

JAGad94050: swlist slows considerably when there are many files in /var/tmp.

HTH,

Dave

[Sajid_1]

Brian,

You should defenitely check the network configuration/warnings during the time you experience this issue. If the problem is intermittent, this can be the problem with the network itself. Do you have any problems running other 'sw' commands ?

# gpm
# netstat

[Martin Johnson]

Check your DNS servers to see if DNS is running. Also check /etc/resolv.conf to see what DNS servers are defined (these are the nameserver lines in the file).

HTH
Marty

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Brian


can you run sam properly ?


Manoj Srivastava