Mark, > One other "symptom." When I "echo 1 > hz_timer", the status of > ksoftirqd_CPU0 becomes "SWN." When I "echo 0 > hz_timer" it becomes "RWN."
Yes, that's the problem. As I recall, the issue is that even though ksoftirqd_CPU0 is really active only very rarely, for some reason the timer interrupts 'conspire' to arrive usually just during those short periods, so that to the stochastic load computation, this process appears to be always running ... This phenomenon appears to be caused by some interaction between the delivery of I/O interrupts and timer interrupts when running under VM (or LPAR with shared CPUs, for that matter). We haven't quite understood this whole issue yet, unfortunately. (Maybe Martin knows more details ...) Bye, Ulrich -- Dr. Ulrich Weigand [EMAIL PROTECTED]
