[lug] load average constant at 2

[John Karns]

On Thu, 14 Sep 2000, Ryan Kirkpatrick was reputed to have said:

> 	I remember reading some where that for every blocked process (has
> a state of D in ps output), the load average is incremented by one. I have
> seen this happen when a tape drive command jams, i.e. 'mt seek 12345',
> tape drive gets lost and gives up, and mt is now stuck in the process
> table with a 'D'. You can't kill it, even as root with kill -9, one has to
> reboot. At the same time, my load average went straight to one with hardly

When this sort of thing has happened to me, I have been able to recover
w/o rebooting by killing the parent process which in a case like this
would be the (bash) shell.  This turns passes control back to getty and
then I can login again at the virtual console in question.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
John Karns                                              jkarns at csd.net
Bogota, Colombia                                  Voice: 57-1-341-0300