Re: RH 8; intermittend very high load

From: Tommy Reynolds (TommyReynolds_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 04/28/04 

Date: Wed, 28 Apr 2004 10:30:18 -0500

On Wed, 28 Apr 2004 11:56:35 +0200, Stephan Wonczak wrote:

> The OP said he had a load of 4 while the CPUs being more or less idle.
> Usually this is an indication that a process is stuck in kernel space
> somewhere. This does count towards the load average while actual CPU
> consumption is zero.

I've been thinking about this. The kind of activity described by the
OP would perfectly match the situation where several processes were
waiting on a semapohre/mutex. When the semaphore was released, there
could be a wakeup sent to each of these processes, resulting in many
processes being on the run queue (and showing up as a high load
average). This could be caused by a kernel bug.

Either scenario could cause the reschedule storm that the OP sees.

This could get _very_ interesting!

Cheers!

Relevant Pages