Why would my load permantnely hover over 1?

Post #360,041 by drook 7/1/12 4:01:49 PM Reply	Why would my load permantnely hover over 1? It's a laptop running Ubuntu. CPU typically shows ~90% idle, but load still hovers near 1. Aaaaand of course now while I'm typing this I see it dropping to 0.4. But it typically shows as more than 1, more often than not. All I'm running is Evolution and Firefox. Where do I look to see why load is so high? -- Drew
Post #360,044 by Another Scott 7/1/12 4:26:29 PM Reply	Kernel drivers? This sounds plausible to me. Dunno what you can do about it though. Check this thread. http://askubuntu.com...t-nothing-running HTH. Good luck. Cheers, Scott.
Post #360,045 by drook 7/1/12 4:31:35 PM 7/1/12 4:34:02 PM Reply	One of the comments mentions overheating I have noticed it's running hot lately. Though with the weather we've been having I wasn't surprised. Maybe time to pop it open and see if it's getting dust-clogged. [edit] Yup, 64C. Time to bust it open. -- Drew Edited by drook July 1, 2012, 04:34:02 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #360,052 by folkert 7/1/12 7:04:49 PM Reply	top then hit "capital" P... then s and enter 1 You'll see what kicking along with top being there.
Post #360,070 by drook 7/2/12 9:17:37 AM Reply	A bunch of small things About 10-12 things, all 1 or 2% CPU. Typical snap: 1072 root 20 0 296m 197m 11m S 2.0 11.2 22:17.87 Xorg 1602 drook 20 0 7536 3504 900 R 2.0 0.2 6:24.18 dbus-daemon 1794 drook 20 0 163m 23m 10m R 2.0 1.3 6:21.16 unity-panel-ser 1890 drook 20 0 1083m 490m 29m S 2.0 27.9 53:17.93 firefox 1642 drook 20 0 116m 25m 11m S 1.0 1.5 2:39.83 unity-2d-panel 1660 drook 20 0 68964 9636 7088 S 1.0 0.5 5:06.28 indicator-multi 1994 drook 20 0 88620 29m 8424 S 1.0 1.7 0:34.73 ubuntuone-syncd 3897 drook 20 0 2828 1152 848 R 1.0 0.1 0:00.60 top 5913 drook 20 0 155m 13m 9m S 1.0 0.8 0:02.76 gnome-terminal Some of that could probably go away if I stopped using Unity, but that doesn't look like it's enough to make a difference. -- Drew
Post #360,106 by scoenye 7/2/12 8:59:22 PM Reply	What do the first 5 lines say? The ones that start with "top", "tasks", "Cpu(s)", "mem" and "swap"? They add some context to what may be going on.
Post #360,055 by scoenye 7/1/12 9:49:49 PM Reply	try iowait the load figure is a measure of how many processes are waiting to make use of the CPU, not how hard the CPU is working. A common reason for high load figures with nothing obvious going on is IO. Most often, harddrive IO. If one process is doing lots of small writes, things will start piling up quickly. iowait is the IO equivalent of "top". You should be able to find out fairly quickly if IO wait is the cause of your high load figures.
Post #360,069 by drook 7/2/12 9:14:41 AM Reply	Command not found ... wtf? And apt-cache search doesn't find anything for it. What package is it in? -- Drew
Post #360,087 by scoenye 7/2/12 6:23:53 PM Reply	Argh! That should be "iotop" My apologies for that one. It has its own package if not installed: iotop.
Post #360,093 by drook 7/2/12 7:28:50 PM Reply	Okay, installed I keep seeing jdb2 every couple of seconds, then occasionally Firefox, syslog and flush. Should that really be writing every couple of seconds? Seems excessive. -- Drew
Post #360,104 by scoenye 7/2/12 8:56:35 PM Reply	Depends on what is being done For me, on this site, Firefox doesn't do anything at all. If the page you're on has some type of Ajax script running, then whatever it downloads will cause disk access. jdb2 is the ext4 journal. It would be normal for this to show up whenever some other program writes to disk. However, there does seem to be an ext4 bug with behavior that matches your description: https://bbs.archlinu...pic.php?id=113516. No clean cause there, but a few workarounds for specific users. flush popping up is normal whenever something has been sent to disk. This is most likely triggered by the Firefox writes.
Post #360,110 by drook 7/2/12 9:46:51 PM Reply	Just changed my commit, will see what happens next reboot -- Drew
Post #360,120 by folkert 7/2/12 11:29:44 PM Reply	This is VERY similar to EXT3 and the IO bugs it had when it first did logging and journaling Oh well. Personally if its a laptop, I turn down the auto stuff... for the journaling to write every 5 seconds.
Post #360,071 by crazy 7/2/12 9:25:09 AM Reply	Doesn't matter Load is processes waiting to run. They can be waiting to run on network io, disk io, KEYBOARD io, etc. Usually it is less than the CPU count, but it doesn't have to be. The key issue is how much headroom do you have to launch new programs. If you run a new CPU heavy program, does it run, and run well, or is it sluggish?
Post #360,072 by drook 7/2/12 9:43:11 AM Reply	I don't run heavy stuff locally any more Wait, playing video. That's the one thing I do that still requires local horsepower. High-res video is still sometimes jerky, which is really amazing considering what I did with 6 live feeds on a Video Toaster back in the mid-80s. -- Drew

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