topic Re: system load in Operating System - Linux

system load

Wilfred Chau_1 — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 13:19:58 GMT

Hi all
Does anyone come across a situation when the cpu is 99% idle but the load average is > 10?

From top, I don't see any cpu hungrey process running at all.

Thanks in advance.

Re: system load

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:23:22 GMT

Shalom,

You have lots of processes waiting to run. This is not a problem unless system response is slow.

Maybe they are dependent on each other.

SEP

Re: system load

Wilfred Chau_1 — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 15:22:35 GMT

Anyway to find out what a thread is waiting on?

Re: system load

Manuel Wolfshant — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 19:07:33 GMT

the load takes into account I/O, too. maybe sar (from sysstat) or vmstat can help you identify the culprit.

Re: system load

yhm_1 — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:06:02 GMT

you can also run :
export DISPLAY='your display'
gnome-system-monitor
it's a nice tool that monitor all your system proccess and you can arrange them by CPU Mem VM ... and more
good luck

Re: system load

Ivan Ferreira — Wed, 16 Aug 2006 17:21:00 GMT

Check for heavy I/O and or paging. Use vmstat PI PO, swapon, iostat and sar.

Re: system load

Moises Plaza — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 06:37:07 GMT

Hi all,

I've this problem in a LiNUX box DL760 with RHEL 3.0 U6.

sar -q
00:00:01 runq-sz plist-sz ldavg-1 ldavg-5 ldavg-15
10:00:00 3 227 1,55 1,40 1,25
10:10:00 2 226 1,33 1,22 1,21
10:20:01 1 226 1,53 1,34 1,25
10:30:00 3 226 5,93 3,78 2,28
10:40:01 1 226 6,20 5,57 3,95
10:49:59 4 228 6,09 6,04 4,98
11:00:00 11 230 7,00 7,06 6,03
11:10:01 7 230 8,59 7,97 6,97
11:19:59 2 234 1,29 2,27 4,38
11:30:00 1 227 1,49 1,51 2,95
11:40:00 2 227 1,56 1,41 2,18
11:50:00 2 227 1,53 1,30 1,73
11:59:59 5 230 1,15 1,29 1,52
12:10:00 4 230 1,73 1,38 1,45

sar
00:00:01 CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %idle
10:00:00 all 6,43 0,00 4,04 11,96 77,56
10:10:00 all 7,25 0,00 4,74 7,77 80,24
10:20:01 all 7,81 0,00 4,61 7,71 79,86
10:30:00 all 7,62 0,00 4,49 9,04 78,85
10:40:01 all 7,65 0,00 4,43 8,97 78,95
10:49:59 all 8,95 0,00 5,36 8,32 77,36
11:00:00 all 9,73 0,00 5,75 6,16 78,36
11:10:01 all 9,46 0,00 5,84 5,69 79,01
11:19:59 all 9,14 0,00 5,21 7,73 77,93
11:30:00 all 9,01 0,00 5,25 8,37 77,37
11:40:00 all 9,47 0,00 5,32 5,29 79,92
11:50:00 all 9,11 0,00 5,31 4,90 80,69
11:59:59 all 9,26 0,00 5,38 5,65 79,71
12:10:00 all 9,15 0,00 5,73 3,90 81,21

As you can see, the load average is high - and the runq-sz - and the CPU load is very low (idle ~ 80%)

What do you think about this issue.

Thanks in advanced

Re: system load

Wilfred Chau_1 — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:19:28 GMT

try to look for any process that does not behave normally. Stop that, and you should be good.

I will close this thread. Thanks everyone.

Re: system load

Wilfred Chau_1 — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 12:20:30 GMT

close thread