FWIW I've also seen situations where processes get stuck in everlasting io wait for inexplicable reasons and absolutely will not go away without a reboot. I've had systems with load upwards of 70 for days or (dare I say) months but which were completely responsive (the *real* load was about 1 or less). Just couldn't get rid of those pesky processes without rebooting, which I didn't want to do.
Corey Edwards wrote: > On Tue, 2008-09-30 at 19:53 -0600, Matthew Walker wrote: >> On Tue, September 30, 2008 4:57 pm, Michael Torrie wrote: >>> 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. >>> >> Huh. Maybe I've generally had well designed systems, but my experience has >> been that if >> my load average is high, there's too many CPU intensive tasks running, and >> they're vying >> for the processor. -- Hans Fugal ; http://hans.fugal.net There's nothing remarkable about it. All one has to do is hit the right keys at the right time and the instrument plays itself. -- Johann Sebastian Bach /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
