Fedora 14 under constant load

[Peter Robinson]

On Fri, Oct 15, 2010 at 6:08 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-10-15 at 10:47 -0600, Orion Poplawski wrote:
>> On 10/14/2010 05:58 PM, Jesse Keating wrote:
>> > -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
>> > Hash: SHA1
>> >
>> > On 10/14/2010 04:49 PM, John Poelstra wrote:
>> >> That's what's so mysterious, very little CPU time or activity.
>> >
>> > I saw this at one point, and the kernel folks found it to be a load
>> > balancing thing gone awry in the kernel.
>> >
>> > 2.6.35.6-33.rc1 seems to include a patch:
>> >
>> > - - Add sched-35-increment-cache_nice_tries-only-on-periodic-lb.patch,
>> > another fix for excessive scheduler load balancing.
>> >
>> > That should be in kernel-2.6.35.6-39.fc14, which is in dist-f14.  My
>> > load went down and the laptop (also an M1330) has cooled down a bit, but
>> > it is still above one usually.
>>
>> With 2.6.35.6-43.fc14.i686.PAE, after letting the machine quiet down a bit
>> after logging in and starting up Firefox and Thunderbird:
>>
>>
>> top - 10:45:59 up 8 min, 14 users,  load average: 0.81, 1.65, 1.12
>> Tasks: 184 total,   2 running, 182 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
>> Cpu(s):  2.0%us,  0.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 97.0%id,  0.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
>>
>> Top causes for wakeups:
>>    40.6% (117.7)   [kernel scheduler] Load balancing tick
>>    29.8% ( 86.4)   firefox
>>     5.9% ( 17.1)   konsole
>>     5.4% ( 15.6)   PS/2 keyboard/mouse/touchpad interrupt
>>     3.7% ( 10.7)   thunderbird-bin
>>     3.6% ( 10.5)   [ata_piix] <interrupt>
>>
>> Actually moving the mouse and typing seems to bring the load back up to 1.
>> Never saw it go below .8
>
> Now I actually look at the load stats, I do seem to have something like
> this problem, I just never noticed (I thought Poelcat was talking about
> CPU load % at first):
>
> [adamw at adam ~]$ uptime
>  10:06:28 up  1:00,  2 users,  load average: 0.77, 0.76, 0.81
>
> on a system where all I've done is booted and sat on IRC in a meeting
> for that hour, using Firefox but nothing super crazy.

Similar for me too

[perobinson at neo ~]$ uptime
 18:17:45 up 2 days, 23:44,  8 users,  load average: 0.93, 0.91, 0.95

Peter