Today, Giuliano Pochini gleaned this insight:
>
> >> I have a machine running web server. It has a lot of httpd's loaded and
> >> most of them are sleeping. The load average is always around 7-13, so I
> >> wonder why the CPU usage doesn't reach ~100%. It wastes CPU time or
> >> simply there is something top does not show ?
> >
> > Two words, "disk I/O".
>
> Which is very low. I have 384MB and disk i/o is below 1MB/s most of time with
> little seeking. Anyway during disk I/O the task is sleeping, not ready, and CPU
> should be given to another task.
They could also be waiting on I/O from the network...
-- --------------------------------------------------------------- Derek D. Martin | Unix/Linux Geek ddm@MissionCriticalLinux.com | derek@cerberus.ne.mediaone.net ---------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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