[wellylug] ubuntu load average

[Daniel Pittman]

Atom Smasher <atom at smasher.org> writes:

> my wife's laptop is running ubuntu 8.10. with top showing the system
> at close to 100% idle (>96%) i haven't seen the load averages drop
> below 1.0.  i'd expect it to be closer to 0.0 when it's >95% idle. any
> ideas why the load averages seem skewed?

Something is either running full time, or waiting on disk I/O.

If nothing shows as using CPU time with top you can run this to find out
what is waiting on disk I/O:

    ps ax | awk '$3 ~ /[dD]/ { print }'

That should give you the command that is waiting on I/O.  If you don't
know what that is post it here.  Also, check the (long) output of
'dmesg' for kernel errors.

Regards,
        Daniel