On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 02:49:43PM -0500, Garrison Hoffman wrote: > This is a regular problem on my MythTV box but I've run into it > elsewhere: I have a load average of, say, 1.50 but CPU usage is 97% > idle. I understand the difference between CPU and Load but I'm not sure > how to address the issue. > > The MythTV box is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with 4GB RAM. The problem was > worse when I had 2 GB RAM and before turning off NVidia's TwinView. > > Any tips?
It's important to understand the difference between load average, and
CPU usage. Load average is "the average number of processes that are
runable each time the kernel schedular kicks in". Runnable means that
they have some work to do. If that work requires a read / write to a
disk, then the process will have to *wait* until that data is ready /
complete. This will show up in top as % WA. Disk IO tends to be the
biggest bottleneck on any reasonable server.
If you aren't seeing performance issues, having a load average of 1.5
isn't such a big deal. I've got a 2.85 right now on my laptop, as
VMWare comes up, but everything is perfectly interactive.
-Sean
--
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Sean Dague Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net Linux Users Group
http://dague.net http://mhvlug.org
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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