The mysterious ever-increasing load averages

Tristan.Greaves@icl.com
Wed, 26 May 1999 15:36:38 +0100


Hi all,

We experienced a very strange issue on a Redhat 5.2 Intel Linux box, which
we have manually upgraded to run the 2.2.x kernel series.

tmg@discord ~ >uname -a
Linux discord.bra01.icl.co.uk 2.2.6 #3 SMP Tue Apr 27 17:31:05 BST 1999 i686
unknown

After about six days uptime, the load averages started steadily increasing.
Yet for no apparant reason! "top" and "ps" didn't show any processes doing
anything out of the ordinary. However, the numbers kept going up.

Eventually, the load average was a solid 10.00, but the machine's
performance was fine!
It seemed as if the load average was lying.

Any ideas? We're not sure why this happened, and have not been able to
reproduce it.

If anyone requires any further information, I will post it.

Tris.

---
Tristan Greaves                        (Systems Integrator) 
Enterprise Solutions                 
ICL                                  Tel: +44 (0)1344 472512 
Lovelace Road                     Mobile: +44 (0)7970 194624 
Bracknell RG12 8SN                  Mail: Tristan.Greaves@icl.com
  

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