Why is my load ave so high now?

[Kevin J. Cummings]

On 07/24/2009 02:04 PM, Andrew Parker wrote:
> 12 is high.  is the system responsive?  if it is, then this again
> points to something that has been nice'd (such as seti), in which case
> its not a problem, except for sendmail - which I would then configure
> for higher limits.

Mostly responsive.  In the past, I've loaded it heavily enough that it 
swapped mightily and waiting for tings to swap back in could take a 
while.  This is definitely not the case right now.

> if its not seti and the system is not very responsive then it could be
> something continuously spawning short lived processes.  these can be
> hard to spot, run the following and see if the process IDs differ by
> much
>
> bash -c 'echo $$'
> sleep 5
> bash -c 'echo $$'


pids differ by 2-3 numbers, but if I run it again, it usually starts 
where the last one left off....

> if they differ by much, then something is creating processes too
> quickly.  you can usually spot these by running pstree -plan a couple
> of times and seeing what the differences are.  you may have to do that
> a couple of times to spot what is causing the problems.

pstree diffs only shows itself as changing....

-- 
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)