No subject

[bogus at does.not.exist.com]

"
      PROCESS STATE CODES
       D   uninterruptible sleep (usually IO)
       R   runnable (on run queue)
       S   sleeping
       T   traced or stopped
       Z   a defunct ("zombie") process
"

If the process is runnable then the userland code is ready to run, and
that is what load measures.

> 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?

It does indeed seem strange. Everytime I've investigated high persistant
loads there have been obvious culprits.