[CentOS] Load Average ~0.40 when idle

Sat Jul 19 23:27:10 UTC 2008
listmail <listmail at entertech.com>

On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 16:04:17 -0700 (PDT), Mark Pryor wrote
> > Replying to my own post as a follow-up. I just checked
> > another machine that
> > I am burning in with CentOS 5.2, and it has the same
> > problem: load average
> > ~0.4 when idle. Both of these machines have Supermicro
> > X7DBN motherboards,
> > but one is running a single quad-core CPU (Intel Xeon) and
> > the other is
> > running two dual-core CPUs (Intel Xeon). Anyone else seeing
> > anything like
> > this?
> 
> Do you have hyper-threading turned on in the bios?
>
No, the BIOS does not support hyperthreading.
> What shows in 
> cat /proc/cpuinfo
> 
This is an example for one of the four CPUS - they are all the same
except for the processor number:
===
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model           : 15
model name      : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU            5130  @ 2.00GHz
stepping        : 6
cpu MHz         : 2000.191
cache size      : 4096 KB
physical id     : 0
siblings        : 2
core id         : 0
cpu cores       : 2
fdiv_bug        : no
hlt_bug         : no
f00f_bug        : no
coma_bug        : no
fpu             : yes
fpu_exception   : yes
cpuid level     : 10
wp              : yes
flags           : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca
cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe nx lm
constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips        : 4001.80
===
>
> do you have 2 virtual CPU's per core?
> 
Nope.

The systems are running at at 1KHz interrupt rate and doing about 20 context
switches per second while idle. But as I said, this does not cause the CPU
load average to move off of 0.00 on another almost identical machine.

Thx,
--Bill