Load

[Hans Fugal]

FWIW I've also seen situations where processes get stuck in everlasting
io wait for inexplicable reasons and absolutely will not go away without
a reboot. I've had systems with load upwards of 70 for days or (dare I
say) months but which were completely responsive (the *real* load was
about 1 or less). Just couldn't get rid of those pesky processes without
rebooting, which I didn't want to do.

Corey Edwards wrote:
> On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 19:53 -0600, Matthew Walker wrote:
>> On Tue, September 30, 2008 4:57 pm, Michael Torrie wrote:
>>> Not sure what you mean here.  High load normally means the CPU is *not*
>>> being utilized efficiently.  In fact, processes are not running because
>>> they are waiting for stuff.  So a high load often will have a processor
>>> that's nearly idle.  Sometimes a process can cause a high cpu usage and
>>> cause the load average to climb if the process is holding down resources
>>> that other processes are waiting on.
>>>
>> Huh. Maybe I've generally had well designed systems, but my experience has been that if
>> my load average is high, there's too many CPU intensive tasks running, and they're vying
>> for the processor.


-- 
Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net

There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the
right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself.
    -- Johann Sebastian Bach