Load average is high: who's to blame?

Andre Costa andre.ocosta at terra.com.br
Sun Oct 8 20:13:41 UTC 2006


Hi,

I've been seeing unusually high load averages on my system lately
(numbers sometimes range between 3.0-5.0, and stay there). I'm not
talking abut CPU load (CPU usage is fine), I guess the problem is I/O
related.

First, I thought beagle could be the culprit; I start beagled on
my .xsession file (with a 19 nice level). beagle-status tells me
there's nothing going on, but stopping it with beagle-shutdown improves
things -- but not as much as I expected. For example, I am know typing
this message and there's nothing going on except for Firefox, Sylpheed
and a couple of GNOME terminals, and load is around 1.2.

I know beagle for Fedora is a couple of versions behind (latest is
0.2.10, latest RPM available is for 0.2.6), so beagle could be indeed
the one to blame.

I don't use GNOME as my desktop, I use fluxbox but I start a couple of
GNOME apps (eg. gnome-panel) on top of fluxbox. Here's what
my .xsession looks like:

nvidia-settings --load-config-only &
gnome-screensaver &
nice -19 beagled &

# enable custom themes loading for GNOME/GTK
/usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon --disable-sound &

# window manager
fluxbox -log $HOME/logs/fluxbox &
wmpid=$!

fbsetbg -l
gnome-panel &

# KDE organizer
kdeinit &
korgac &
korganizer &

gnome-terminal --hide-menubar --geometry=82x56+1+30 &
gnome-terminal --hide-menubar --geometry=82x62-82+30 &

gkrellm &

sudo /usr/bin/root-tail --cont "... " --cont-color yellow -f -g \
1000x300+10-35 -fn "-*-*-*-*-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" \
/var/log/messages,gray50,

(sleep 10; workrave) &
(sleep 15; gaim) &

wait $wmpid

beagle-shutdown
kdeinit_shutdown
(sleep 5; killall -9 bonobo-activation-server) &
killall -9 audacious
killall -9 firefox-bin

I know I can use sar from systat tools to help me see something is
wrong, but I don't know how to see _what_ is actually causing the
high loads. Any hints?

TIA

Andre

-- 
Andre Oliveira da Costa




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