On Wed, 26 May 1999 15:36:38 +0100, Tristan.Greaves@icl.com said:
> 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!
Try a "ps uax", you'll see a bunch of processes stuck in "D" state.
That implies something in the kernel locking up: those processes still
contribute to the load (just like processes blocked waiting for normal
disk IO also contribute to the load), but because they are not ever
getting scheduled they have no impact on system performance.
"ps lax" will tell you where in the kernel they have blocked.
--Stephen
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