Beau Henderson wrote: > > > On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 10:04 AM, Beau Henderson > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > > > On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 9:53 AM, Alan McKinnon > <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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
I would never have guessed this was your problem but I had the same thing happen on my DESKTOP puter a while back. I hit the eject button, closed the tray again, restarted hald and it went back to normal. I also had a TON of errors in messages too. I have cron set up to rotate messages so I may not have those now. This may be a different cause but does make one wonder. Also, it hasn't done it since. Dale :-) :-)
