[CentOS] High load since passing from rhas3 to centos4.8

[Kwan Lowe]

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 3:02 PM,  <fortin.pierre at bell.ca> wrote:
>>Are you by any chance now running a CPU throttling program and weren't >before?
>
> ACPI is not enabled. Other than that I couldn't tell. Sorry if it sounds noob.
> What can I check to be sure nothing is throttling the CPU?
>

Check if you're running cpuspeed and perhaps cat out /proc/cpuinfo and
look at the CPU MhZ entry. If it doesn't match the advertised speed of
your CPU then you likely have some sort of throttling enabled.

Here's the best article I've found on the CPU speed and top output:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001

In short, if you're throttling your CPU (this generally being a *good*
thing, since it minimizes power usage but still provides the same
response) then the load average may seem to be higher.  But the real
metric to watch is how many processes are waiting rather than the load
stat from top.