1

Any utility to find source of system load / load average for a certain period?

view story
linux-howto

http://unix.stackexchange.com – By running top, htop, uptime, etc. we can see the load average as three values indicating the average load for the last 1/5/15 minutes (well not really, but that isn't the question here). Sometimes I'll notice that I have a fairly high load average for the last 15 minutes, but the current load is very low. Is there a utility/program that can list the processes (even if they no longer exist) that consumed the most CPU-time for the last 1/5/15 minutes (or some other similar period)? I am aware that load average can also be caused by processes waiting for I/O, but I am mostly interested in seei (HowTos)

Danial's picture
Submitted by Danial on 12/06/2012

Stories similar to Any utility to find source of system load / load average for a certain period?

Load Average on a server reflects the current state of the server. Higher the load average, poorer is the server performance. The following shell script monitors the load average on the Linux server and inform the server administrator with the current running processes if the load average is greater than the defined threshold. Create a file, [...]

I had the query as to whether the load average in a multi CPU machine should be

(load average/no of CPUs)

We have 4 CPU on our VMware RHEL instance, so the load average should be

Load average/4.

I hope, my question is clear.

Please revert with the reply to my query.

Regards

What's Your Uptime? 1 year 43 weeks ago

Desktop00:05:08 up 2 days, 8:13, 2 users, load average: 0.25, 0.10, 0.07Laptop <- just started  a live cd23:05:27 up 5 min, 6 users, load average 0.09, 0.09, 0.05Server00:07:56 up 19 days, 13:55, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05Firewall00:48:55 up 1 day, 12:24, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05

George.Harmony https://bbs.archlinux.org/profile.php?id=36546

20

Understanding system load 31 weeks 8 hours ago

I was looking at the system load of my shared hosting account.

$ uptime 09:14:37 up 21 days, 5:38, 4 users, load average: 3.85, 4.96, 5.21

I'm not worried by the first and second values, they represent peaks of work.

But 5.21 for the last 15 minutes seems a bit high. Or maybe not?

When a computer has for example 6 physical cores and 12 logical cores CPU, which number do we have to rely to consider a high load average ?

A load average > 6 or a load average > 12 ?

For exemple :

CPU : Intel Xeon E5-1650 Cores / Threads : 6 / 12 Fréquence : 3.2GHz / 3.8GHz Turbo Boost

A Drupal 7 site with CiviCRM, after running smoothly for a year on a 1&1 VPS suddenly became unresponsive. Now pages eventually load, but can take more than a minute.

Looking at resource use in Virtuozzo, the load average carries a warning, and has remained above 1. While I understand this isn't particularly high, this is a change from when the site was working.

Hi,My web server is running CentOS 5.7. At irregular intervals, during the past few months, the load average sometimes shot up to 20 for many hours. Normally, it should rang... [by dawn]

With linux kernel 2.4.22-1.2199.nptlsmp (I know, it's very old) Sometimes Load average increases to big value (over 7) but my 4 vCPU are in

idle state (5% busy every cpu). My web procedure was gone down so I found out that process (with 4732 process id, see my following output)

was in 'uninterruptible sleep' state (classified as 'D ').

I have a server that's running CentOS 5, and it will periodically (a couple of times a day) have enormous spikes in load, and the whole server will grind to a halt.