Why is my load ave so high now?

[Bill Davidsen]

Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> On 07/25/2009 09:58 AM, Aaron Konstam wrote:
>> Wwll two things, one positive and one negative. The r column tells us
>> there are not many processes waiting for run time which we normally
>> associate with a low load average, However your number of interrupts per
>> second (in) are rather high. Some kernel action seems to be really
>> beating your machine over the head so to speak. How you find out what
>> processes these are that are that are interrupting is not clear to me,
>> however. Is your primary process doing a lot of I/O?
> 
> No, astropulse should be CPU bound, not IO bound.  It reads in some 
> data, performs *lots* of calculations on it (hours worth) and then 
> writes the results out to a file which it then sends back to SETI, and 
> downloads another work unit.
> 
> I'm very much intrested in how I can figure out where the interrupts are 
> coming from....
> 
> so I ran 2 copies of "cat /proc/interurupts" 10 seconds apart, and here 
> are the delta interrupts in that time....
> 
>>            CPU0
>>   0:          0   IO-APIC-edge      timer
>>   1:          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
>>   4:          0   IO-APIC-edge
>>   6:          0   IO-APIC-edge      floppy
>>   7:          0   IO-APIC-edge      parport0
>>   8:          0   IO-APIC-edge      rtc0
>>   9:          0   IO-APIC-fasteoi   acpi
>>  12:          0   IO-APIC-edge      i8042
>>  14:          0   IO-APIC-edge      pata_amd
>>  15:        209   IO-APIC-edge      pata_amd
>>  16:       2790   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ivtv0
>>  18:          9   IO-APIC-fasteoi   aic7xxx, cx88[0], cx88[0], 
>> cx88[0], eth0
>>  20:         60   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ohci_hcd:usb2, NVidia CK8
>>  21:        114   IO-APIC-fasteoi   ehci_hcd:usb1, ohci_hcd:usb3
>>  22:         21   IO-APIC-fasteoi   sata_nv
>> NMI:          0   Non-maskable interrupts
>> LOC:        246   Local timer interrupts
>> RES:          0   Rescheduling interrupts
>> CAL:          0   function call interrupts
>> TLB:          0   TLB shootdowns
>> TRM:          0   Thermal event interrupts
>> SPU:          0   Spurious interrupts
>> ERR:          0
>> MIS:          0
> 
> Could it be my ivtv0 (PVR-350) board?  Its not supposed to be doing 
> anything at the moment!  There's nothing plugged into it, and its not 
> configured under MythTV right now (cable went all digital)....
> 
> I'll try removing the driver module and see if that helps.  At worst, 
> I'll remove the board entirely.
> 
Looking at the original 'top' output, all the CPU was going to nice processing, 
presumable SETI. When you kill that you note the load average is still high, 
could we see the top few lines again to see the distribution? I note that hi/si 
are low, and load average indicates runable process (my first guess was the seti 
went threaded). So 'top' with the 'i' visual option (only show runnable tasks) 
should show what's running.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot