Why is my load ave so high now?

[Kevin J. Cummings]

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)