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Tracking down load issue
| Posted by Xandrios, 05-13-2008, 09:07 PM |
| Hi,
I have a CentOS box here that is causing some strange load. Brand new X3230 (4*2.66Ghz), 2GB ram and 2*500GB SATA2 in raid-1 on a LSI MegaIDE controller.
Basically the server is continuesly at a load of 1. However I dont see why. No CPU load, and no IO as far as I can see. Does anybody have a tip where to look for the problem?
With the WHT benchmark test the machine scores about 520 points, seems not bad either.
Only thing I could think of is that it has something to do with the raidcard. The data transfer rate is quite low. Could it be that the card is rebuilding the array? Can I check that without rebooting?
Last edited by Xandrios; 05-13-2008 at 09:12 PM.
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| Posted by layer0, 05-13-2008, 09:19 PM |
| You should be able to check the state of the array (no reboot required) by downloading the CLI and/or storage manager from your RAID card manufacturer.
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| Posted by Philio, 05-13-2008, 09:21 PM |
| Load average refers to how many processes are using or waiting for the CPU, hence it is possible a single process can cause a load of 1 without using much CPU. I'm not sure under what circumstances this might occur but it is possible.
Don't most RAID controllers require that you use the BIOS to rebuild a a RAID set?
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| Posted by Xandrios, 05-13-2008, 09:54 PM |
| Thanks. I guess I should contact support to figure out which card it is exactly since dmesg does not seem to give a model no.
Well, all the 4 cores are 100% idle. So the problem kinda must be somewhere else. All running processes are sleeping as well, with one exception: The raidcard driver at status 'D'. (Should be expected).
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| Posted by Xandrios, 05-14-2008, 01:09 PM |
| Turns out it is an onboard raidcontroller provided by the mainboard (Intel SR1530). They checked the HDD utilization and the drives were almost completely idle...so its not like there is a rebuild in progress or anything like that.
Besides IO, what could cause such load? It is *exactly* 1.0:
13:08:50 up 10:49, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
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| Posted by msherman, 05-14-2008, 01:20 PM |
| While running top, if you hit 'i' to filter out all of the idle processes, are you left with any processes in the list that are constantly in the "run" state?
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| Posted by ximi, 05-14-2008, 08:10 PM |
| On my quadcore system, my load average is 4.00 all the time. Why? I run SETI@Home. Someone might be running one of these distributed computing programs so check for that. Wouldn't hurt to post the full process list.
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| Posted by Alex, 05-14-2008, 08:27 PM |
| Moved to Tech/Security Issues.
Alex
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| Posted by Xandrios, 05-15-2008, 07:06 AM |
| Seems that the raid driver does have something to dow with it. But what exactly..
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