Re: debug a high load average

[Erik Mouw]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2005 at 04:38:36PM +0530, Rajesh wrote:
> I have a case occasionally when I copy data from a usb storage (ipod) to 
> my hard drive the load average goes up from 0.4 to about 15.0, and the 
> system becomes very unusable till I kill the cp command. I have checked 
> the CPU usage, bytes read from usb device, byte written to hard drive 
> etc, and all these values are low like CPU usage is at a maximum of 30%, 
> disk read bytes is at an average of 1.5 MiB/s, disk write bytes is at 
> 1.5 MiB/s, number of processes is at 110, etc, during this high load.

1.5 MB/s suggests you're using an IDE drive in PIO mode. Switch to DMA
mode (hdparm -d 1 /dev/hda) and see if it gets any better.


Erik

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+-- Erik Mouw -- www.harddisk-recovery.com -- +31 70 370 12 90 --
| Lab address: Delftechpark 26, 2628 XH, Delft, The Netherlands
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