[wellylug] ubuntu load average

[Atom Smasher]

On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Jethro Carr wrote:

> Have you checked to see if there are any odd processes which are crashed 
> but stuck waiting for disk?
>
> In theory, if a program crashed in such a way that it was always waiting 
> for I/O it would cause 1 to be added to the load.
>
> Run a ps aux and see if there are any processes not in sleep that should 
> be. Check for anything with a STAT of "D".
=====================

guilty!
  4873 ?     D    0:00 hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/scd0 (every 2 sec)

i can kill that process (i was surprised that it died without a fight, 
being in "uninterruptible" sleep) and the load average quickly dropped to 
<0.05. much better.

i can make the load average climb again by running "/etc/init.d/hal 
restart".

i'm familiar with FreeBSD, and hal isn't part of my setup. i'm not even 
sure if this is a real problem, or something that's ok to ignore. what do 
ya'll think?

thanks...


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