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On Monday 11 February 2008, James wrote: |
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> Hello, |
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> |
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> One of the workstations (amd64 2gig ram) has a load that never drops |
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> below 1.0, as seen by top. Looking at a ps nothing stands out. I did |
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> notice that 'X' is at the top of the list, even when the machine is |
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> quiescent (nobody doing anything). Suspiciaous. Clearly I have a run |
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> away or hidden process using resources. Although all my system run |
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> kde 3.5.8 only one shows this problem. |
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> |
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> None of my other Gentoo system suffer this fate. Any ideas on finding |
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> the culprit(proccess)? |
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First thing to understand is exactly what the system load is. Maybe you |
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already know this, but I'll post it anyway for the benefit of everyone |
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else reading. |
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Load is defined as the number of processes waiting for cpu time averaged |
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over a certain time period. top and uptime measure this in three |
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periods - 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes. A process can be waiting |
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for cpu time because it is "blocked" - waiting for some I/O to |
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complete. Therefore it's easy to get a high load and low cpu |
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utilization. I find this in fact to be the most common reason (!) |
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vmstat is your friend here. It's all in the man page, so use it and |
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narrow down the process that's blocking. Maybe you have a threading |
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race condition or similar. |
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Also look into a hardware difference between this machine and the |
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others, and differences in the kernel config and loaded modules. |
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If all this reveals nothing, then maybe you do have a suspicious |
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problem. In which case, post back real quick :-) |
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-- |
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Alan McKinnon |
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alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com |
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-- |
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gentoo-user@l.g.o mailing list |
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