[lug] High load with 'w'

[rm at fabula.de]

On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 04:58:07PM -0600, Jeff Schroeder wrote:
> Hello all--
> 
> I had a server go haywire for a few minutes, and apparently it started 
> having issues delivering web pages.  It's running Apache+PHP+MySQL and 
> little else, so the bulk of the load on the server is web requests.
> 
> Curious why people couldn't access web pages, I logged in and checked 
> the load:
> 
> 4:48pm  up 79 days,  5:03,  2 users,  load average: 75.87, 76.00, 76.13
> USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU  WHAT
> root     pts/1    cpe-66-87-136-19  4:48pm  0.00s  0.04s  0.00s  w 
> 
> Whoa, a load average of 76?!  That seems impossibly high to me... I've 
> had servers get completely hammered and not go above 4 or 5.
> 
> Doing a 'ps' showed 87 Apache processes-- well below the maximum number 
> allowed by default (200, IIRC).  I stopped and restarted Apache and 
> everything cleared up nicely, which makes me think there were some 
> zombie processes.  It fixed the problem but didn't solve the puzzle.
> 
> In any case, has anyone seen loads like that?  Was it just a fluke with 
> the 'w' (and 'top') command, or something I should look into more 
> closely?

Distro/Server version/Libc version? 
Yes, i've seen this, but there are many reasons for such a behavior.

 Ralf Mattes

> TIA,
> Jeff
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