On Wednesday 05 December 2007, Garrison Hoffman wrote: > Mike Kershaw wrote: > > Loadavg is calculated by the number of processes which aren't running > > for some reason. "Some reason" can be disk load, io load, or "just not > > feeling like it". The latter is especially true for kernel threads for > > some hardware, which count towards the loadavg. > > You over simplify, load average includes running processes, runnable > processes, and (on Linux) processes waiting for I/O. Runnable, waiting, > and most certainly running are not the same as "aren't running".
It almost sounds like you want some way of knowing if there is blocking or locks on memory pages that are causing processes to wait. I've briefly seen kernel developers in posts on the LKML discuss how to get statistics for these, but I don't remember the details. Thinking along these lines I thought Mike's description of "just not feeling like it" was actually fairly fitting. > As it turns out, I've killed some "nice to have but not critical" > processes (hellanzb, irexec, irxevent) and the current load is: > 0.24, 0.71, 0.97 hellanzb is an automated Python Usenet news reader; automated decoding of Usenet news can definitely be a process that can generate load. The other two programs sound like they're related to an IR remote, so I don't know how those could be culprits. > Brief observations indicate that the load will generally stay well under > 1.00 even while flagging commercials or recording HD input, which is > what I expected. > > Unfortunately the only tool I seem have is top and trial-and-error > guesswork, so my original question of how to best address this still > stands. Try gleaning the LKML [Linux Kernel Mailing List] concerning the recent change in scheduler to the CFS ["Completely Fair Scheduler", which frankly is an oxymoron]. That was the umbrella subject of threads where developers posted output statistics about memory page blocking/locking and various wait states as they tested the new scheduler for 2.6.23. -- Chris -- Chris Knadle [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Dec 5 - Open Source Show and Tell Jan 2 - TBD Feb 6 - DBUS Mar 5 - Setting up a platform-independent home/small office network using Linux
