On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Beau Henderson <b...@thehenderson.com>wrote:
> > > On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckin...@gmail.com>wrote: > >> On Thursday 19 February 2009 01:38:39 Beau Henderson wrote: >> > I've tried manually altering the governor to performance but its the >> same >> > story. >> > >> > The system doesn't appear sluggish, I'm really more concerned that >> > something is causing the load and this might lead to shorter battery >> life >> > and and more heat. >> >> Right in the beginning you said the load was *exactly* 1.00. Now, load is >> defined as >> >> "the _number_ of processes on average waiting for the cpu in the last 1, >> 5, 15 >> minutes" >> >> So it does not mean that the cpu is necessarily working hard (but usually >> does) if the load is high. Yours is _exactly_ 1.00 (very suspicious) >> >> This is almost certainly one of two things: >> >> 1. A stupid kernel config that you should not have done :-) >> 2. Some app is blocking hard on IO >> >> I guess #2 - something waits for IO, it is not available, so immediately >> goes >> back to sleep waiting for it's next time slice. This happens many times a >> second and averaged over a minute looks like the cpu is constantly busy. >> Thus, >> no real extra cpu load is happening, the machine does not appear at all >> sluggish and the only harm is that it is annoying as hell. >> >> -- >> alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com >> >> >> > Woah, now were getting somewhere. > > After reading that, I had another look at the top output and noticed that a > single hald process was in D state. /etc/init.d/hald stop and the load is > lowering as I type. I'm going to have to dig into this deeper as time > permits. > > Thanks everyone :) > > > -- > Beau Dylan Henderson > > "No human being should be denied the fundamental right to educate > themselves or indulge their curiosities. To deny any person the right to do > so, for whatever reason, is nothing more than the safeguarding of ignorance > to ensure that enlightenment does not become a threat. For nothing in this > world is more dangerous than an open mind." -- Matthew Good > The culprit: Hals cdrom polling. Interestingly, the load shot down as soon as I stuck a disk. The fix: hal-disable-polling --device /dev/scd0 'hal' -- Beau Dylan Henderson "No human being should be denied the fundamental right to educate themselves or indulge their curiosities. To deny any person the right to do so, for whatever reason, is nothing more than the safeguarding of ignorance to ensure that enlightenment does not become a threat. For nothing in this world is more dangerous than an open mind." -- Matthew Good
