high load while cpu state almost 100% idle?

[Stefan Farrelly]

This situation occurs when you have a hardware problem. Check dmesg for any hardware errors, and check STM (LOGTOOL) to view all logged hardware errors. More than likely some device is experiencing lots of hardware problems which causes the load to remain high.

[Michael Roeder]

Check the utilization of the disks with "sar"

Maybe the process doprocs of messdev is doing many time the same thing on the same disk.

Try
ls -laR / > /tmp/1 &
ls -laR / > /tmp/2 &
ls -laR / > /tmp/3 &
you will see the heavy load

[Chris Wilshaw]

To be honest, I wouldn't consider this to be an indication of a high load.

Load averages: 1.17, 1.22, 1.25

Looking at the current figures from one of my systems that is under "normal" use, I have

Load averages: 0.96, 1.31, 1.63

If the load was to get to 4 or higher, I'd maybe start to look at what jobs were running on the system. I've seen systems with the hardware problems that Stefan mentioned, and the load generally exceeds 10 (30 or more is not uncommon, depending on the use of the system), and I've seen a system that had a load of over 90 in an extreme case.

All in all, I'd say you've little to worry about here.

[Hr. RJH Verhagen]

I think I found the problem: at night we make a backup (not at 6 o'clock but at 3 o'clock). The backup system was full. The backup tried to write on a full nfs. I cleaned the backup system and hope everything is alright now.
Thanks,
Robert verhagen.