On Wed, Jan 10, 2001 at 10:18:02PM -0700, Erik Huizing wrote:
> I just noticed the load on my machine is unusually high. The wierd thing
> is that its not doing anything. Top says this:
> 
> load averages:  2.11,  2.13,  2.09				22:12:51
> 28 processes:  1 running, 27 sleeping
> CPU states:  0.3% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  0.0% interrupt,  100% idle
> Memory: 9584K Act, 2124K Inact, 248K Wired, 42M Free, 4K Swap, 64M Swap free
> 
> Looking over the %CPU from ps -ef says everything is pretty 0.0%. Same
> thing from top when I sort by CPU. The system doesn't seem sluggish
> either. 
> 
> So why is the load so high?

Maybe you have a process or two which wakes up very often but for a very short
period of time. So it increases the load but uses almost no CPU.

Some programs polling for events (like battery status bars) can do this.

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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