Why is my load ave so high now?
Kevin J. Cummings
cummings at kjchome.homeip.net
Fri Jul 24 15:08:34 UTC 2009
On 07/24/2009 10:15 AM, Aaron Konstam wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-07-23 at 22:51 -0400, Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
>> When I was running F8, my server averaged a load ave oof around 4.
>>
>> Now that I'm running F10, and bittorrent is no longer running, in fact,
>> not much of anything besides Seti at Home (BOINC client running
>> astro_pulse), my load average is up around 11 and frequently exceeds 12
>> (and of course when it exceeds 12, it stops receiving emails). Here's a
>> 5 second snapshot from top:
>>
>>> top - 22:48:06 up 2 days, 18:51, 5 users, load average: 11.15, 11.33, 11.63
>>> Tasks: 250 total, 2 running, 247 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
>>> Cpu(s): 5.9%us, 1.8%sy, 92.0%ni, 0.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.3%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
>>> Mem: 2074172k total, 1932680k used, 141492k free, 108872k buffers
>>> Swap: 3911816k total, 552k used, 3911264k free, 977568k cached
>>>
>>> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
>>> 3234 root 39 19 50292 46m 2072 R 91.7 2.3 3520:10 astropulse_5.06
> What is astropulse that is using 91.7% of your cpu? You also seem to
> have a large number of tasks running and sleeping which might up your
> load average.
astropulse is the SETI at Home BOINC client that I run (NICEd to 19).
It only uses "excess cycles" and in the past my load average has never
exceed the 3-5 range, except when I was doing "real" work on the system
(like running firefox, thunderbird, and other real programs), something
I almost never do anymore since I bought myself a laptop.
Yeup, but not consuming any real CPU resources.
I guess what I'm asking is if only 1 job is grabbing most of the CPU,
then what's causing the system to thrash? (Is a load average of 12
considered a thrashing system? sendmail thinks it is.)
>>> 3378 root 20 0 324m 36m 8496 S 3.6 1.8 14:34.20 Xorg
>>> 16271 cummings 20 0 172m 60m 21m S 1.1 3.0 0:37.77 thunderbird-bin
>>> 4026 cummings 20 0 22412 11m 7612 S 0.5 0.6 0:09.28 metacity
>>> 4108 cummings 20 0 27276 11m 8748 S 0.4 0.6 18:41.47 multiload-apple
>>> 4126 cummings 20 0 74844 18m 10m S 0.4 0.9 0:07.54 gnome-terminal
>>> 4027 cummings 20 0 63536 20m 10m S 0.3 1.0 0:27.59 gnome-panel
>>> 4030 cummings 20 0 34104 13m 5500 S 0.3 0.7 0:24.95 gnome-screensav
>>> 16252 root 20 0 2560 1184 844 S 0.3 0.1 0:00.97 top
>>> 4086 cummings 20 0 57960 14m 9716 S 0.2 0.7 0:06.57 wnck-applet
>>> 4093 cummings 20 0 34464 14m 10m S 0.2 0.7 5:31.08 clock-applet
>>> 196 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.1 0.0 1:08.89 ata/0
>>> 971 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.1 0.0 3:38.03 scsi_eh_5
>>> 2838 root 20 0 3332 520 364 S 0.1 0.0 0:05.12 lircd
>>> 3138 root 20 0 3624 1032 912 S 0.1 0.0 0:14.66 hald-addon-stor
>>> 3175 root 20 0 3624 1032 912 S 0.1 0.0 0:37.94 hald-addon-stor
>>> 3194 mailman 20 0 13620 7000 2820 S 0.1 0.3 0:53.14 python
>>> 3879 cummings 20 0 58964 30m 8092 S 0.1 1.5 21:56.13 gnome-settings-
>>> 4478 cummings 20 0 10044 4432 2376 S 0.1 0.2 0:01.48 xterm
--
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)
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