[CentOS] weird load values

J. Potter

jpotter-centos at codepuppy.com
Wed Dec 5 14:39:41 UTC 2007


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?

best,
Jeff

Linux someHostName 2.6.18-8.1.8.el5 #1 SMP Tue Jul 10 06:39:17 EDT  
2007 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

CentOS release 5 (Final)

  09:31:15 up 65 days, 17:45,  2 users,  load average: 0.92, 200.91,  
371.30




More information about the CentOS mailing list