[CentOS-virt] steadily increasing/high loadavg without i/o wait or cpu utilization

----- "Günter Zimmermann" <guenter.zimmermann at gmx.at> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I just installed centos 5.4 xen-kernel on intel core i5 machine as
> dom0.
> After some hours of syncing a raid10 array (8 sata disk) I noticed a
> steadily increasing loadavg. I think without reasonable i/o wait or
> cpu
> utilization the loadavg on this system should be very lower. If this
> loadavg is normal I would be greatful if somone could explain why.
> The
> screenshots below show that there is neither much i/o wait nor much
> cpu
> utilization.

Do you have any zombie or D state processes? Try:

ps -eo stat,command | awk '$1 ~ /^[DRZ]/{print}'

If you have any in D, you can use SysRq-T and/or the pid's wchan in /proc to figure out what they're doing or dmesg to figure out where they may have barfed.

-- 
Christopher G. Stach II