[wellylug] ubuntu load average

[Pete Black]

Some machines have irq issues with the linux kernel, this can manifest 
as a high load average, clock drift etc.

check /proc/interrupts and if the rtc or some other thing is spewing 
thousands of interrupts per second, that will raise you load average on 
idle significantly.

Not sure how to fix this - on a desktop machine you could try disabling 
apic/acpi with kernel args but a lappy kind of needs that stuff for 
power management. Something to check anyway.

-Pete

> 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
>
>
>