On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 03:38:49PM -0500, Sean Dague wrote: > On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 02:49:43PM -0500, Garrison Hoffman wrote: > > This is a regular problem on my MythTV box but I've run into it > > elsewhere: I have a load average of, say, 1.50 but CPU usage is 97% > > idle. I understand the difference between CPU and Load but I'm not sure > > how to address the issue. > > > > The MythTV box is an AMD Athlon 64 3000+ with 4GB RAM. The problem was > > worse when I had 2 GB RAM and before turning off NVidia's TwinView. > > > > Any tips? > > It's important to understand the difference between load average, and > CPU usage. Load average is "the average number of processes that are > runable each time the kernel schedular kicks in". Runnable means that > they have some work to do. If that work requires a read / write to a > disk, then the process will have to *wait* until that data is ready / > complete. This will show up in top as % WA. Disk IO tends to be the > biggest bottleneck on any reasonable server. > > If you aren't seeing performance issues, having a load average of 1.5 > isn't such a big deal. I've got a 2.85 right now on my laptop, as > VMWare comes up, but everything is perfectly interactive.
Seconded. This will especially true on a system with a) pending disk io (which you likely have on a myth box) and b) pending device io (again, probably true with your video capture or audio capture). Any blocked process counts towards load avg, and it's normal for things to block on other conditions besides CPU. -m -- Mike Kershaw/Dragorn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GPG Fingerprint: 3546 89DF 3C9D ED80 3381 A661 D7B2 8822 738B BDB1 "This sick joke is my JOB!" -- Eric
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