[lug] weird high loads

[Andrew Diederich]

On two of my linux boxes I have a load of > 3.  This is really weird,
especially because they're not doing much.  Top shows not a whole lot of cpu
activity, not much memory activity.  How do I figure out why my load average
is so high?

-Andrew


(top on one of the 'puters)
 11:11am  up 27 days, 23:07,  6 users,  load average: 3.03, 3.06, 3.07
110 processes: 106 sleeping, 4 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states:  2.9% user,  3.5% system,  0.0% nice, 94.2% idle
Mem:  127964K av, 112696K used,  15268K free,  48260K shrd,  63216K buff
Swap: 266072K av,  12376K used, 253696K free                 14856K cached

  PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT  LIB %CPU %MEM   TIME COMMAND
13811 andrew     4   0   792  792   596 R       0  2.1  0.6   0:00 top
 8139 andrew     2   0   584  472   376 S       0  1.9  0.3   3:01
xosview.bin
14071 postfix    8   0   568  568   448 S       0  0.5  0.4   0:00
trivial-rewr
14078 postfix   10   0   708  708   560 S       0  0.5  0.5   0:00 smtp
14070 postfix    6   0   652  652   520 S       0  0.3  0.5   0:00 cleanup
14075 postfix    9   0   700  700   556 S       0  0.3  0.5   0:00 local
 8142 andrew     0   0   400  288   196 R       0  0.1  0.2   0:49 xeyes