machine load

[Marcel Schepers]

Hello,

When I start a backup using star and monitor the machine load using top I see something I do not understand. The load average is 1.00 while the CPU claims 97.6% idle time. I have attached a screenshot. Isn't that strange, a load of 1.00 combined with that much idle time?

For the record, I am using a HP C35480A on a linux machine (Debian, 2.4.21) using an Adaptec AVA-2904 SCSI card.

[Dave Dewar]

Hi Marcel,

This post might be more suitable in one of the linux forums. It doesn't sound like a drive issue.

Cheers,

Dave Dewar

[Marcel Schepers]

Hello Dave,

You're right! It is now in Linux General.

Have a nice day,
Marcel

[Tim D Fulford]

Load average is simply the number of running or runable processes. IF you have a process that is in the "runable" state (i.e. not doing much work) then this can indeed happen.

Chances are is that the tape drive is slow in comparision to the process, thus it spends a great deal of time waiting on IO.

I have little knowledge of Linux stuff, this is a general UNIX question IMHO

Tim