Load

[Michael Torrie]

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.
> 
> I can only think of a handful of instances of some other resource being the bottleneck
> that raised my load average.

Right. I get what you're saying.  For example, if there were too many
apache worker processes or something.  Worth a look.  Andrew never
mentioned if his CPU was 100% busy or practically idle (or sitting at
75% wait).