High Load Average

C

co~

Verified User
Joined
Nov 4, 2004
Messages
13
Hello,

Currently, my DA server has a load average of around 7.00

I don't know what causes this. It's a freshly installed machine with about 30 (really low-end) websites on it. Even the full system backup won't run in this condition, saying :

Performing sanity checks: Completed
Checking load average: System load higher than acceptable limits, aborting...
Performing cleanup operations: Completed

It's a 2.4 GHz machine with 1 Gb RAM. When I run 'top' the CPU load is most of the time 0.0%.

Help !
 
We're not clairvoyant.

If top is reporting 0.00, then where are you seeing 7?
Often when you can't see what services are are creating the load the system has been compromised.

Jeff
 
Hehe, I'm sorry.

In the header of 'top', next to 'cpu(s)', it mostly showed that the cpu was somewhere between 99 and 100% idle. But, in the top right corner it showed a load average of '8.02, 7.44, 7,12'. 'uptime' also gave this numbers.

I stopped various services, like apf, httpd, mysqld, exim but nothing worked. The load-numbers didn't go down.

When I tried to reboot the system (what else was there to do ?), the system responded on a 'shutdown -r now' command with 'the system is going for a reboot NOW!'. Quite normal you would say, but now comes the funny part, the system DID NOT reboot at all. I tried it several times, with no luck.

Only one solution was left, a hard reboot by the voltage masterswitch. So I did.

System reboots, and everything is back to normal. The system has been running the past night and the load average is around 0.10 ~0.30 again.

I guess that some sort off process kept bugging the resources. I don't know what it has been and that kinda frustrates me.
 
Yes, it's under 'complete usage statistics' ..

//EDIT

Ok ! :-)
 
Load average really isn't; it's how many processes are waiting to execute (on average) during the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.

Usually when you run top you should look at the topmost services to see what needs to be shut down to lower load averages.

Jeff
 
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