Load average is high: who's to blame?

[Kam Leo]

On 10/8/06, Andre Costa <andre.ocosta at terra.com.br> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I've been seeing unusually high load averages on my system lately
> (numbers sometimes range between 3.0-5.0, and stay there). I'm not
> talking abut CPU load (CPU usage is fine), I guess the problem is I/O
> related.
>
> First, I thought beagle could be the culprit; I start beagled on
> my .xsession file (with a 19 nice level). beagle-status tells me
> there's nothing going on, but stopping it with beagle-shutdown improves
> things -- but not as much as I expected. For example, I am know typing
> this message and there's nothing going on except for Firefox, Sylpheed
> and a couple of GNOME terminals, and load is around 1.2.
>
> I know beagle for Fedora is a couple of versions behind (latest is
> 0.2.10, latest RPM available is for 0.2.6), so beagle could be indeed
> the one to blame.
>
> I don't use GNOME as my desktop, I use fluxbox but I start a couple of
> GNOME apps (eg. gnome-panel) on top of fluxbox. Here's what
> my .xsession looks like:
>
> nvidia-settings --load-config-only &
> gnome-screensaver &
> nice -19 beagled &
>
> # enable custom themes loading for GNOME/GTK
> /usr/libexec/gnome-settings-daemon --disable-sound &
>
> # window manager
> fluxbox -log $HOME/logs/fluxbox &
> wmpid=$!
>
> fbsetbg -l
> gnome-panel &
>
> # KDE organizer
> kdeinit &
> korgac &
> korganizer &
>
> gnome-terminal --hide-menubar --geometry=82x56+1+30 &
> gnome-terminal --hide-menubar --geometry=82x62-82+30 &
>
> gkrellm &
>
> sudo /usr/bin/root-tail --cont "... " --cont-color yellow -f -g \
> 1000x300+10-35 -fn "-*-*-*-*-*-*-10-*-*-*-*-*-iso8859-1" \
> /var/log/messages,gray50,
>
> (sleep 10; workrave) &
> (sleep 15; gaim) &
>
> wait $wmpid
>
> beagle-shutdown
> kdeinit_shutdown
> (sleep 5; killall -9 bonobo-activation-server) &
> killall -9 audacious
> killall -9 firefox-bin
>
> I know I can use sar from systat tools to help me see something is
> wrong, but I don't know how to see _what_ is actually causing the
> high loads. Any hints?
>
> TIA
>
> Andre
>
> --
> Andre Oliveira da Costa
>

Run top as root to see which process is taking the most cpu time.