Matthew Walker wrote: > On Tue, September 30, 2008 4:43 pm, Andrew Jorgensen wrote: >> Okay folks, I'm going out on a limb and admitting to some ignorance >> here. Suppose I have a high load average on a server, let's say 20, >> how do I tell what's really going on? I understand that load means >> that there are processes waiting for some resource but how do I see >> what resources they are waiting for? We don't want to go buy more RAM >> and then find out that we had plenty of RAM, for instance. >> > > The most likely culprit is CPU time. Easiest way to check this is to run top, > and see > how many processes are sharing the CPU.
Not sure what you mean here. High load normally means the CPU is *not* being utilized efficiently. In fact, processes are not running because they are waiting for stuff. So a high load often will have a processor that's nearly idle. Sometimes a process can cause a high cpu usage and cause the load average to climb if the process is holding down resources that other processes are waiting on. /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
