[TAG] Tracking load average issues

[Neil Youngman]

On or around Wednesday 18 July 2007 22:19, Jim Jackson reorganised a bunch of 
electrons to form the message:
> On Wed, 18 Jul 2007, Neil Youngman wrote:
> > I was asked to look at a system that had a consistent load average around
> > 5.3 to 5.5. Now I know very little about how to track down load average
> > issues, so I haven't been able to find much. The CPU usage is about 90%
> > idle, so it's not CPU bound.
>
> Have you run the "top" command? It shows which processes are most active.
> I believe there are such things as gtop, ktop? etc for the those suffering
> command line timidity^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htemerity (timidity is a midi
> application :-).

Yes, top was the first thing I ran, which is where I got the 90% idle figure.

> A load ave of 5 means that there were on ave 5 processes read to run for
> the whole of the averaging period - the usual ave periods are 1min 5min
> and 15min.

That much I found, although apparently "ready to run" includes waiting for 
I/O, otherwise they would soak up that 90% CPU idle time. What I haven't 
found yet is a way to tell which processes are waiting on I/O and why?

Neil