try iowait

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.

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