How to debug high system load?

[Suvayu Ali]

On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 08:36:31AM -0500, Steven Stern wrote:
> On 07/12/2012 06:00 AM, Suvayu Ali wrote:
> rottled down and are at about 1%.
> > 
> > So my question is since CPU usage is already so low, what could be
> > driving up the system load? This is bugging me since I also see a
> > general sluggishness compared to a much faster system early this year.
> > 
> > Thanks for any ideas.
> > 
> 
> Are you listening to music?  Doing background uploads or downloads?
> 

No nothing like that. On login, I start two processes `conky -D' and
`emacs --daemon'. Apart from this I only have a few terminals, Firefox
and a few emacs frames open. The Xfce session amanger starts pidgin and
dropbox. That's about all the processes.

I also use OfflineIMAP to sync my email, but that is setup to run every
5 minutes, and it has been setup as a cron job for ages; I never had
problems with it before.

Right now, my network usage is less than a KiB/s, both upload and
download, and my lod average is 0.98!

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.