[CentOS] Tracking down whats causing a high load?

[Will McDonald]

On 21/06/06, Ian mu <mu.llamas at gmail.com> wrote:
> The strange one was on the vmstat 5 suggestion, the r (waiting for runtime)
> column is pretty much 0, if the load is > 1 shouldn't that be mostly > 1
> also, or am I misunderstanding the load definition?
>
> I.e currently load is 1.98
>
> procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- --system--
> ----cpu----
>  r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id
> wa
>  0  0    624  34652  66608 1059564    0    0     1     9    0     0  3  1 96
>  0
>  0  0    624  34436  66608 1059564    0    0     0    39 1207  2534  1  1 97
>  0
>  0  0    624  34268  66608 1059564    0    0     0    42 1202  2412  1  1 98
>  0

That looks like a lot of context switches to me, though I'm not sure
if that's by virtue of the number or type of CPUs or the workload
you're running.

The most consistently busy boxes I have here rarely see more than
1-300 context switches and sit at a load average of  0.50, 0.67, 0.61.

Will.