Why is my load ave so high now?

Kevin J. Cummings cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Fri Jul 24 02:51:35 UTC 2009


When I was running F8, my server averaged a load ave oof around 4.

Now that I'm running F10, and bittorrent is no longer running, in fact, 
not much of anything besides Seti at Home  (BOINC client running 
astro_pulse), my load average is up around 11 and frequently exceeds 12 
(and of course when it exceeds 12, it stops receiving emails).  Here's a 
5 second snapshot from top:

> top - 22:48:06 up 2 days, 18:51,  5 users,  load average: 11.15, 11.33, 11.63
> Tasks: 250 total,   2 running, 247 sleeping,   0 stopped,   1 zombie
> Cpu(s):  5.9%us,  1.8%sy, 92.0%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.3%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
> Mem:   2074172k total,  1932680k used,   141492k free,   108872k buffers
> Swap:  3911816k total,      552k used,  3911264k free,   977568k cached
> 
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                                                                         
>  3234 root      39  19 50292  46m 2072 R 91.7  2.3   3520:10 astropulse_5.06                                                                                                                                                                 
>  3378 root      20   0  324m  36m 8496 S  3.6  1.8  14:34.20 Xorg                                                                                                                                                                            
> 16271 cummings  20   0  172m  60m  21m S  1.1  3.0   0:37.77 thunderbird-bin                                                                                                                                                                 
>  4026 cummings  20   0 22412  11m 7612 S  0.5  0.6   0:09.28 metacity                                                                                                                                                                        
>  4108 cummings  20   0 27276  11m 8748 S  0.4  0.6  18:41.47 multiload-apple                                                                                                                                                                 
>  4126 cummings  20   0 74844  18m  10m S  0.4  0.9   0:07.54 gnome-terminal                                                                                                                                                                  
>  4027 cummings  20   0 63536  20m  10m S  0.3  1.0   0:27.59 gnome-panel                                                                                                                                                                     
>  4030 cummings  20   0 34104  13m 5500 S  0.3  0.7   0:24.95 gnome-screensav                                                                                                                                                                 
> 16252 root      20   0  2560 1184  844 S  0.3  0.1   0:00.97 top                                                                                                                                                                             
>  4086 cummings  20   0 57960  14m 9716 S  0.2  0.7   0:06.57 wnck-applet                                                                                                                                                                     
>  4093 cummings  20   0 34464  14m  10m S  0.2  0.7   5:31.08 clock-applet                                                                                                                                                                    
>   196 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.1  0.0   1:08.89 ata/0                                                                                                                                                                           
>   971 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.1  0.0   3:38.03 scsi_eh_5                                                                                                                                                                       
>  2838 root      20   0  3332  520  364 S  0.1  0.0   0:05.12 lircd                                                                                                                                                                           
>  3138 root      20   0  3624 1032  912 S  0.1  0.0   0:14.66 hald-addon-stor                                                                                                                                                                 
>  3175 root      20   0  3624 1032  912 S  0.1  0.0   0:37.94 hald-addon-stor                                                                                                                                                                 
>  3194 mailman   20   0 13620 7000 2820 S  0.1  0.3   0:53.14 python                                                                                                                                                                          
>  3879 cummings  20   0 58964  30m 8092 S  0.1  1.5  21:56.13 gnome-settings-                                                                                                                                                                 
>  4478 cummings  20   0 10044 4432 2376 S  0.1  0.2   0:01.48 xterm                                                                                                                                                                           

I'm not swapping, in fact, my program memory usage is < 40% (of 2GB).
And I'm sure there are less processes contending for the CPU since my 
Gnome session is pretty bear right now.  No firefox, and only this 
instance of thunderbird....

I'm open to any WAGs right now as to the cause.  Its probably something 
I haven't yet fixed from my preupgrade....(from F8)

-- 
Kevin J. Cummings
kjchome at rcn.com
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
cummings at kjc386.framingham.ma.us
Registered Linux User #1232 (http://counter.li.org)




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