On Wednesday 05 December 2007 12:58, Kain, Becki (B.) wrote:
> I have 2 suse boxes that are web servers with load averages
> consistently above 65 (they are 4 processor intel boxes).  Top shows
> :
>
> top - 15:52:36 up 359 days, 19:01,  3 users,  load average: 66.08,
> 66.18, 66.10
> Tasks: 393 total,   1 running, 392 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 35.9% us, 61.7% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id,  0.0% wa,  0.1% hi,
> 2.3% si
> Mem:   8305936k total,  7048988k used,  1256948k free,   294540k
> buffers Swap:  1048560k total,      148k used,  1048412k free, 
> 5520856k cached
>
>   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
> 20406 www       15   0 72072  12m 5284 S 15.1  0.2   1574:17 httpd
>  7870 www       15   0 71580  11m 5284 S 15.1  0.1   2344:59 httpd
>  6166 www       16   0 72824  12m 5284 S 14.8  0.2   4807:47 httpd
> 26408 www       17   0 71404  10m 5372 S 10.5  0.1   8030:04 httpd
> 10542 www       16   0 65032  10m 5284 S 10.2  0.1  11612:40 httpd
> 30603 www       16   0 73300  12m 5284 S 10.2  0.2  17962:34 httpd
> 25364 www       16   0 70488  10m 5272 S 10.2  0.1   4681:35 httpd
>
>
> I'm confused - and I'll admit that it's been a while since I've been
> a sys ad.  Httpd runs in user space, right?  So why am I not seeing
> system processes at the top of top?  Or am I reading this
> incorrectly?  What more can I be looking at to see what in system
> space is eating the system?

I don't think your system is being "eaten." You have four processors, 
only one active process (at the moment you captured this snapshot), and 
that would have to be top itself, since by definition it must be 
running when it issues the various system calls (mostly reading from 
files in /proc) to get the raw data it presents.

Furthermore, you CPU utilization is only about 36%. That's not an 
indication of an overtaxed system.


The so-called "load average" is a very misleading indicator of system 
load. You're best looking at more basic indicators of system activity 
and load such as CPU utilization, I/O activity and swap rates.


> Thanks in advance


Randall Schulz
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