[K12OSN] Sever load , calculating

[Barry Cisna]

Hello All,

Server:
Intel Xeon 2.4GHZ - smp- 2.6.18-194  kernel
( As i see it Linux sees/dmesg  this as a single processor,even though
the smp kernel gets installed?)
2GIG ram
(2) 500 IDE HD's
(2) 10/100 nics 1 activated
LVM /ext3 (no md raid)
Centos 5 (updated) 5.5


Wondering if anyone can shed some light on my wonderings here.
Over the summer i rebuilt our school's file server with bigger HD's (2)
500 gig PATA/IDE,and this time updated the CENTOS 5 install to 5.5 along
with the latest version of Samba as well. Everything else in regards to
hardware remained the same as last school year.
What puzzles me somewhat is when looking at the CPU load reading when I
log into Webmin the load is sometimes as high as 8.x! I do not ever
remember seeing these readings this high last school year. What strikes
me as being odd is only a max of 500kb of the 2 gig ram is ever used and
the swap is only used about 100kb as well.
>From my brief finding I can see as many as 200 connections to the
H:( Samba home folders),but usually a max of 15 files actually open at
any one time looking through Webmin again.
Has others here experienced these high loads but very little memory
being used either physical and/or swap?
Running top from a shell never shows any odd/obvious processes eating
the cpu up. The load number varies greatly from hour to hour too.
Example; one hour .60, half hour later 8.x!
No "MY made up" cron jobs are running during the day such as
backups,etc.
Sorry for long post.

Take Care,
BC