On Friday 25 November 2005 02:31, Alberto wrote:
Is there any command to view what kernel is doing when I have a high kernel/system load??
Unfortunately Linux has no real good way to determine that... Unless you got bad hardware (got any old qlogic fibre cards in your box by any change) there is most likely some process that is issueing a huge number of system calls. The other possibility is that some device causes a ton of interrupts.
The system call stuff is more likely. I would start with top and look for the process that has the highest cpu utilization - system calls usually also have some from of processing in user mode. Then use strace -p <pid> to check the process... Anything up to few pages per process per second is normal and generates nowhere the system load you're seeing. Most likely you'll end up with a process that spins in a loop and does stuff like stat, accept or read over and over again.
Peter.