Problem: Load average of 6, no I/O, 25% idle time. Why?

[Timothy Normand Miller]

I have a four processor box, running three compute loads.  The kernel
I'm running is 2.6.25-gentoo-r5.

One process has four threads, and it's niced to 19.
Another process has one thread and is niced to -10
The last process has one thread and is niced to 0

One processor is always idle.

If I change either the 0 to a -10 or the -10 to a zero, then all four
cores are properly utilized.

Does this make sense to anyone?  Besides messing with the nice levels,
is there another way to fix this?

Thanks!

-- 
Timothy Normand Miller
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~millerti
Open Graphics Project
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