High load average (~2.0) on an idle PowerPC 64 machine
From: David Laight <hidden>
Date: 2011-03-25 09:23:47
I've this Quad G5 machine that's sitting pretty much idle with the latest Debian stable installed, and yet it's got an abnormaly high load average.
The 'load average' value is rather useless since it seems to contain any process that is sleeping uninterruptibly, and IIRC any process that has run at all (for however short a period) in the current schedule epoch (or whatever period is relevant). I can easily generate a linux system that is 99.9% idle but has a 'load average' of 20 or more. It would still be 99.9% idle even if the idle time were based of the actual time outside the scheduler idle loop (as NetBSD doe) rather than where timer ticks interrupted. We also have the related fubar (on x64/amd64) of the kernel generating stack traces for processes that are sleeping uninterruptibly for long periods. David