Why is my load average 3.00?
Greetings-
On a new box I just built, the load average has been 3.00 for a couple of
days now, with really no significant work being done. The box is a pretty
powerful one (AMD XP 2200+, 1GB RAM, plenty of storage) and it's really
not doing anything most of the time - email, mozilla, openoffice, and
emacs usually, except when I run R to do some statistical heavy
lifting. Any idea why it might be at load average of 3.00? Here's the top
of top:
21:57:26 up 2 days, 50 min, 5 users, load average: 3.00, 3.00, 3.00
74 processes: 73 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU states: 0.2% user, 1.0% system, 0.0% nice, 98.8% idle
Mem: 1030176K total, 328432K used, 701744K free, 19920K buffers
Swap: 1951888K total, 0K used, 1951888K free, 150596K cached
PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
337 root 13 -10 271M 15M 3900 S < 0.5 1.4 0:18 XFree86
13325 root 15 0 960 960 748 R 0.1 0.0 0:00 top
1 root 8 0 488 488 424 S 0.0 0.0 0:03 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 keventd
3 root 19 19 0 0 0 SWN 0.0 0.0 0:00
ksoftirqd_CPU0
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 kswapd
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 bdflush
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:02 kupdated
51 root 9 0 0 0 0 DW 0.0 0.0 0:00 khubd
130 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 eth0
135 daemon 9 0 428 428 352 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 portmap
141 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 rpciod
142 root 9 0 0 0 0 SW 0.0 0.0 0:00 lockd
197 root 9 0 784 784 668 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 syslogd
200 root 9 0 1172 1172 424 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 klogd
207 root 9 0 692 692 596 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 rpc.statd
210 dictd 9 0 10084 9.8M 9080 S 0.0 0.9 0:00 dictd
218 root 8 0 760 760 676 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 inetd
223 root 9 0 744 744 652 S 0.0 0.0 0:00 lpd
261 postgres 8 0 1692 1692 1612 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 postmaster
263 postgres 9 0 1672 1672 1620 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 postmaster
264 postgres 9 0 1728 1728 1624 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 postmaster
273 root 9 0 1236 1236 796 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 nmbd
275 root 9 0 1244 1244 772 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 smbd
281 root 8 0 1276 1276 1064 S 0.0 0.1 0:00 sshd
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Andrew J Perrin - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
clists@perrin.socsci.unc.edu * andrew_perrin (at) unc.edu
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