[wellylug] ubuntu load average

[Pete Black]

I've personally seen rtc interrupt wierdness causing idle load problems 
on one of my AMD machines, though that machine has a completely screwy 
APIC/ACPI implementation too.

If its not the issue, its not the issue, but its something to check 
into. if /proc/interrupts shows thousands or millions of rtc interrupts, 
while all the other interrupt counts are low, you don't think that might 
be an indication of a problem in this area?

-Pete
> Pete Black <pete at marchingcubes.com> writes:
>
>   
>>>>> Some machines have irq issues with the linux kernel, this can manifest
>>>>> as a high load average, clock drift etc.
>>>>>
>>>>>           
>>>> Really?  Your description sounds very much like a screaming interrupt of
>>>> some sort, which is a very serious issue, but your description here
>>>> doesn't quite match up.
>>>>
>>>> The only citations I can find for high load average on idle or clock
>>>> drift don't suggest interrupt issues, but rather kernel or hardware
>>>> faults in other areas.
>>>>         
>> Maybe this is the problem?
>> http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/High_Idle_Load_Average
>>     
>
> It could be, but the issue discussed there is a bug in the kernel
> returning silly values from two different time related calls, resulting
> in processes not sleeping when they expected to.
>
> None of that is really to do with interrupt handling or anything like
> that, but rather with different versions of "time" in the kernel
> disagreeing.
>
> Regards,
>         Daniel
>
>
>