Re: [2.1.130] High load average appearing from the shadows.

Noah Beck (noah@ecn.purdue.edu)
Mon, 30 Nov 1998 08:52:59 -0500

I've been getting something similar when running StarOffice 5 along
with any other CPU-hogging process--the load when just running SO5
is 0 or thereabouts, but if I start a background process, the load
jumps to 2 (rather than 1). The assorted SO5 threads show up last
in the "top" list and claim not to be using any CPU, and strace
shows some sort of loop using select() with a short timeout. So I
don't suppose you're running SO5? (I get this on 2.0.36.)

Noah

Robert Thoerncrantz wrote:
>
> Sometimes I find that load average rises whithout top showing
> any CPU eating processes. The system stays perfectly
> responsive as ever, just as if nothing special was going on.
>
> Usually it is stuck at one, and starting top to investigate
> gives a load average of about two.
>
> If I start the rc5-client, top shows it at >95% as it should,
> and load average slowly gets to almost 3. Then it drops to the
> more normal ~1.0 again and everything returns to normal.
>
> I'm trying to reproduce it on demand, but have not had any
> luck yet. Am I the only one that experiences this problem with
> load average?
>
> The kernel is a vanilla 2.1.130 (UP), but it happened in
> 2.1.129 (and, I believe, 2.1.128) too, then I thought it was
> just some weird effect from the UP-flu.
>
> Linux version 2.1.130 (rtz@pirx) (gcc version 2.7.2.3) #1 Fri Nov \
> 27 14:34:14 CET 1998
>
> 12:53pm up 2 days, 15:30, 3 users, load average: 2.19, 1.69, 1.28
> 49 processes: 47 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
> CPU states: 5.7% user, 2.8% system, 0.0% nice, 91.7% idle
> Mem: 30448K av, 29648K used, 800K free, 12040K shrd, 3216K buff
> Swap: 66524K av, 16836K used, 49688K free 11404K cached
>
> PID USER PRI NI PAGEIN SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
> 8471 rtz 17 0 233 748 748 568 R 2.6 2.4 0:08 top
> 251 root 19 0 19552 6776 5068 1548 R 2.4 16.6 76:52 XF86_S3
> 32753 rtz 8 0 6749 7664 2740 988 S 1.3 8.9 8:59 netscape
> 31889 rtz 7 0 1792 1156 812 432 S 1.1 2.6 9:43 wish
> 2111 root 9 0 6753 880 620 496 S 0.9 2.0 0:36 xterm

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