[ale] Load?

[Michael Hirsch]

On 5/19/05, David Corbin <dcorbin at machturtle.com> wrote:
> top - 20:43:03 up 18 days,  7:57,  2 users,  load average: 4.00, 4.00, 4.00
> Tasks:  65 total,   1 running,  64 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
> Cpu(s):   0.7% user,   0.0% system,   0.0% nice,  99.3% idle
> 
> Here are the top few lines from a top.  The system is substantially idle, yet
> the load reads a consistent '4'.
> 
> How do I track the source of this behavior down?

Last time I saw this a hard drive had failed, and the nightly slocate
job was hanging trying to access the disk.  Each task was stuck in the
kernel, so it added 1 to the load average, but wasn't busy as the disk
wasn't talking.  This only got noticed when the LA went over something
like 16 and then sendmail stopped responding--sendmail is clever and
if the LA is too high it assumes the box is busy.

I found it by running "ps aux" and looking for unusual jobs in unusual states.

Michael