[wellylug] ubuntu load average
Daniel Pittman
daniel at rimspace.net
Wed Jan 21 12:13:20 NZDT 2009
Atom Smasher <atom at smasher.org> writes:
> 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.
Very strange; presumably your CD[1] drive is doing something strange that
means it isn't sitting in a normal sleep.
> 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?
Well, the load average is a more or less meaningless figure alone.
There is no particular number that means anything good, bad or
indifferent.[2]
If you just want to disable the CD polling, which means no notification
when a CD is inserted, use 'hal-disable-polling'
Regards,
Daniel
Footnotes:
[1] For "CD" read "CD or DVD, or equivalent optical media drive"
[2] As an example, on some of the recent Sun hardware that goes to
extremes for multi-core operation a load average of more than 200
is just fine — the system has 250 cores, so a load average of 200
indicates that it is running at a comfortable ~80 percent capacity.
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