Chris G. Demetriou wrote
> 
> Berndt Josef Wulf <wulf@ping.net.au> writes:
> > usually I'm not very concerned about the load averages on my system, but
> > this seems to be rather strange....
> > 
> > After upgrading my workstation from NetBSD-1.3.3 to NetBSD-1.4-i386 I noticed 
> > "uptime" reporting load averages > 2  for all three time intervalls whilst
> > vmstat and top show idle times > 97%. The system is still very
> > responsive and I wouldn't have noticed this if it wasn't for porting
> > a program to NetBSD which makes use of the getloadavg() function.
> > This all happens whilst the system is sitting idle with no major
> > activity taking place.
> 
> I don't know why this would change between 1.3.3 and 1.4, but do you
> have any processes in 'D' wait?  Those are counted as 'runnable' for
> the purpose of calculating the load average.
> 
> However, your statement of "idle with no major activity" makes me
> think you're not expecting to see any...

G'day,

thanks to all of you and in particular to Urban how put me onto the
right track. The solution would have come sooner if I've had mentioned
that the system had the KDE windows manager running. After killing
off kaudioserver and maudio thinks improved a little. Nevertheless,
system load still was > 1.

After terminating KDE and running XWindows using the twm windows manager
things started to improve dramatically. System load is now < .20
when idle - see below.

load averages:  0.18,  0.20,  0.18                            07:59:20
34 processes:  1 running, 33 sleeping
CPU:  0.5% user,  0.0% nice,  0.5% system,  0.0% interrupt, 99.0% idle
Memory: 15M Act 944K Inact 296K Wired 9176K Free 4K Swap 97M Swap free

I still don't know what causes KDE to place such a high load onto the
system and my only hope is that this may improve on next release of
KDE.

Thanks again

cheerio Berndt
-- 
Name	: Berndt Josef Wulf
E-Mail	: wulf@ping.net.au
Sysinfo	: DEC AXPpci33+, NetBSD-1.3.3