Re: [rhn-users] system load average and top

["Mr.Anderson" <mr anderson comsystems net>]

>> Hi, I'm currently having some weird readings on my machine. Here's
> the
>> output of top.
>>
>> 10:54am  up 42 days, 14:28,  2 users,  load average: 15.73, 14.17,
> 16.45
>> 284 processes: 279 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
>> CPU states:  5.9% user, 14.1% system,  0.0% nice, 79.9% idle
>> Mem:   514696K av,  473584K used,   41112K free,       0K shrd,
> 91628K
>> buff Swap: 1048088K av,   25280K used, 1022808K free       104152K
>> cached
>>
>> Does this makes sense? The CPU has no load and yet the load average
> is
>> high? Any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks for any info.
>>
>>
>>
>> Deks
>
> Umm...What do you mean "the CPU has no load"? It's at 20% used (79.9%
> idle). 20% usage is a lot depending on your CPU Mhz. If CPU is at 20%
> used, and the load average is at 15% at first glance seems ok. So a
> quick
> guess without looking at the processes is it's normal.
>
> Do you notice any weird processes running? Type:
>
> 'ps aux |more'
>
> to see current processes with userid running it. Look carefully at the
> list and see if there's any process you don't recognize.
>
> Mr.Anderson
>
>
>> Deks wrote:
>
> Yes there seem to be load on the CPU but most of the time its on the
> range 79-98% and yet my load average would jump to 40-50+. This machine
> is an P3 1.2Ghz and I run listserv which uses sendmail. And sendmail
> processes only eats up 0.1% of the CPU all the time.
>
> Thanks.

Well, I'm guessing here to try to point you in the right direction.
Sendmail processes eating 0.1% is good. That seems normal. Perhaps when
Sendmail is about to send out onto your listserv that's when your load
average jumps to 40-50%. After the listserv is done it should go back
down. If that's the case on your system then all that sounds normal to me.

What you can do is let top run continuously and watch the load average.
Once it jumps to 40 or 50 press 'CTRL-D' or just the 'q' key (for quit)
and look at the process list. The first 2 or 3 are the current processes
that are using the most system resources. This will tell you what process
(program) is causing the jump to 40-50% usage.

Hope this helps.

Mr.Anderson