On Monday 11 February 2008, James wrote: > Hello, > > One of the workstations (amd64 2gig ram) has a load that never drops > below 1.0, as seen by top. Looking at a ps nothing stands out. I did > notice that 'X' is at the top of the list, even when the machine is > quiescent (nobody doing anything). Suspiciaous. Clearly I have a run > away or hidden process using resources. Although all my system run > kde 3.5.8 only one shows this problem. > > None of my other Gentoo system suffer this fate. Any ideas on finding > the culprit(proccess)?
First thing to understand is exactly what the system load is. Maybe you already know this, but I'll post it anyway for the benefit of everyone else reading. Load is defined as the number of processes waiting for cpu time averaged over a certain time period. top and uptime measure this in three periods - 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes. A process can be waiting for cpu time because it is "blocked" - waiting for some I/O to complete. Therefore it's easy to get a high load and low cpu utilization. I find this in fact to be the most common reason (!) vmstat is your friend here. It's all in the man page, so use it and narrow down the process that's blocking. Maybe you have a threading race condition or similar. Also look into a hardware difference between this machine and the others, and differences in the kernel config and loaded modules. If all this reveals nothing, then maybe you do have a suspicious problem. In which case, post back real quick :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
