Load average is high: who's to blame?

[Gordon Messmer]

Andre Costa wrote:
> 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.

ps axf | awk '{if($3 !~ /S/) {print}}'

You'll see all of the processes which aren't sleeping.  Load average is 
a count of those processes, over time.