Long Term Cache Hits went haywire

[novellmel]

On Friday, May 10, 2002 I noticed that the Long Term Cache Hits on my Novell NetWare 5.0 server (Service Pack 6.0a - the latest) went haywire for no apparent reason.

At its peak, the Long Term Cache Hits was somewhere around 12,000%. That's right - 12,000. On Saturday morning, May 11, it was as low as 4%. Nobody uses the server on weekends. As of tonight (Sunday, May 12), the LTCH is currently at 63%.

Anyone have any ideas as to what could be causing this? Nothing was changed on the server. There are no error messages in the Sys$log.err. There are no abends. Dirty Cache Hits stays very low (returns to 0 frequently). Total Cache Buffers is well above 50% of Original Cache Buffers. None of the volumes is above 66% full.

I would appreciate any explanation of what might be happening. Thanks.

 

[salserocito]

Has the Server ever exhibited this type of behavior before now? How long ago did you update to SP v6.0a?

Check and verify your Set Parameters relating to LTCH.

Good Luck!

 

[novellmel]

To salserocito: Thank you for responding to my problem.

I upgraded to Service Pack 6.0a on January 2nd, 2002. The server has not exhibited these problems before.

I have not yet checked the set parameters for LTCH, but I have not changed them since I installed SP6.0a.

 

[salserocito]

Has anything changed? What about an Anti-Virus Program?

 

[novellmel]

Nothing has changed on the server except for the AntiVirus Program, the latest version of which was installed a week or two ago. We are currently running Norton AntiVirus. The Program Version is 7.60.926. The Scan Engine is 4.1.0.15. The Virus Definitions are from 5/10/02 rev. 8. I'm glad you mentioned that. The co-worker who keeps our Norton AntiVirus current said something about installing a new revision not very long ago. We were having problems with GroupWise not properly scanning some e-mail messages.

 

[salserocito]

Are your clients setup to automatically update their Virus Definition Files on a particular day and time?

We use McAfee here (urgh!) and we have the Clients setup to check for updates on Fridays between 9pm and 6pm.

Maybe that's what you are looking at... all of your workstations hitting the same peice of data within a certain time period.

Good Luck!

 

[novellmel]

The clients update the virus definitions every day at noon. That hasn't changed for several months.

The very thing you were talking about is one of the reasons why we chose noon. The updates could be sent to the PCs at a time when most of them would be on, but there would be few people actually using them for anything. In addition, Norton usually posts its virus definition updates by mid-morning.

 

[novellmel]

I just thought I'd let everyone know that these same Long Term Cache Hits that went absurdly high went very low and have since slowly increased. As of this morning, the LTCH was at 94%. Nothing has been changed since all of this happened. It's all right at the moment, but, since I haven't yet figured out what caused the LTCH to go haywire, there's nothing to prevent the same thing from happening again!