[CentOS] weird load values

Tomasz 'Zen' Napierala zen at allegro.pl
Thu Dec 6 15:48:56 UTC 2007


Wednesday 05 December 2007 15:39:41 J. Potter napisał(a):
> Hi List,
>
> I'm stumped by this:
>
> 	load average: 10.65, 594.71, 526.58
>
> We're monitoring load every ~3 minutes. It'll be fine (i.e. something
> like load average: 2.14, 1.27, 1.03), and then in a single sample,
> jump to something like the above. This seems to happen once a week or
> so on a few different servers (all running in a similar application).
> I've never seen the 1 minute sample spike as high as the 5 or 15
> minute samples.
>
> Seeing as that last value is a 15 minute period, well, it doesn't seem
> possible that one can have a 500+ 15 minute sample without having
> observed a spike in the 5 minute sample at least 5 minutes before.
>
> Also, there aren't 500+ processes on these systems -- it's typically
> around 100 total processes (ps auxw | wc -l). (Is there a way to see
> the total count of kernel-level threads?)
>
> Thoughts?

As mentioned before, IO could give such strange results. I suggest launching 
dstat with logging to a file, and analyzing the file afterwards.

-- 
Tomasz Napierala
System Administrator
QXL Poland - Allegro.pl Team
http://www.allegro.pl/



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