# High Load Averages .. New Kernel

## eltech

Well, before i continue let me just say that i will be rebooting this box when i have someone on standby who can watch it go down and cross the fingers to come back up. Im inquiring for educations sake and further options i might have; or even now before i reboot.

Ok .. did some upgrading this week and just starting looking a little closer at TOP and i see that the load averages are pretty high.

CURRENTLY

```

top - 16:15:17 up 127 days, 23:49,  1 user,  load average: 9.00, 9.00, 8.86

Tasks: 118 total,   1 running, 117 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

Cpu(s):   0.2% user,   0.2% system,   0.0% nice,  99.7% idle

Mem:    515160k total,   452472k used,    62688k free,    61084k buffers

Swap:  1004052k total,    49456k used,   954596k free,   276472k cached
```

so its 99.7 idle, but high in load averages.. so i did some looking around and found that i might have some processes in D state that are causing the high load average. 

so i did a top -i and found the following

```

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                              

28759 root      18   0  1080 1080  812 R  0.3  0.2   0:00.04 top                                                                                                                  

12157 root       9   0   688  444  444 D  0.0  0.1   0:25.48 updatedb                                                                                                             

25757 root       9   0   524  524  464 D  0.0  0.1   0:00.77 df                                                                                                                   

25340 leonardb   9   0  1004 1004  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.01 sftp-server                                                                                                          

25355 leonardb   8   0  1004 1004  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.01 sftp-server                                                                                                          

27413 leonardb   9   0  1000 1000  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.01 sftp-server                                                                                                          

27435 leonardb   9   0  1008 1008  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.01 sftp-server                                                                                                          

27634 leonardb   9   0  1008 1008  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.01 sftp-server                                                                                                          

27688 leonardb   9   0  1004 1004  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.00 sftp-server                                                                                                          

28356 leonardb   9   0  1000 1000  772 D  0.0  0.2   0:00.00 sftp-server   
```

Now, this week i did upgrade the kernel, but didnt reboot.. so this is what im thinking is the problem ..

am i right?

this is a Dell 1600SC has been rock solid for over 3 years now and doubt there are any hardware issues.. load average has never been this high since the kernel upgrade..

also mentioning that i can not SFTP to the box and i made no changes to the configs; so this should be working. As you see its going stale.

Thanks for the help .. !   :Wink: 

----------

## commonloon

slocate's updatedb can drive up the load average because it (obviously) uses a lot of disk while it indexes files. Does the machine have a big disk or array?

Do you have iostat installed? What does it say?

Damn, I hate those sort of reboots! Wait to see if its back to the office or if its time to camp out at the colo....

----------

## eltech

 *commonloon wrote:*   

> slocate's updatedb can drive up the load average because it (obviously) uses a lot of disk while it indexes files. Does the machine have a big disk or array?
> 
> Do you have iostat installed? What does it say?
> 
> Damn, I hate those sort of reboots! Wait to see if its back to the office or if its time to camp out at the colo....

 yea, seems like he slocate got stuck or something ..

the array is raid 5 on 60gb in size drives ..

iostat i dont have, wonder if i could emerge it and run it ..

well, im in FLA (florida) the server is our NY office location (my fathers office), so this would be a bad bad thing   :Crying or Very sad: 

thanks for the help!   :Wink: 

----------

## commonloon

iostat is part of sysstat:

```

emerge sysstat

```

It includes sar as well. I would _guess_ that killing the updatedb process wouldn't be so bad. You might need to remove the db file and regenerate it. It is usually:

```

/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db

/var/lib/slocate/slocate.db.tmp

```

----------

## eltech

well, today is reboot day .. but i did emerge sysstat .. heres what it looks like..

anything to get worried about?

```

Linux 2.4.27 (pcns.domain.com)    09/26/05

avg-cpu:  %user   %nice    %sys %iowait   %idle

           0.72    0.00    0.15    0.00   99.13

Device:            tps   Blk_read/s   Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn

dev2-0            0.00         0.00         0.00          1          0

dev8-0            3.10        21.65        41.87  240689985  465446094

```

keep in mind that 2.4.27 is the old kernel .. the new kernel has not yet been applied .. the reboot will apply the new kernel ..

----------

## commonloon

Looks fine to me.  Check your modules and cross you fingers.

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## eltech

Well, the rboot went well with no problems except some apache 2 changes.. and what seems to be an odd php issue..

thats a seperate issue, but none the less everything is well ..

thanks for your help.. and good luck to you!

----------

