High load average but low CPU usage
January 17th, 2010One of my Debian servers had its load average pegged at 3.0 but top didn’t show anything using a lot of CPU. A little Google research revealed this approach that solved things for me:
top -b -n 1 | awk '{if (NR <=7) print; else if ($8 == "D") {print; count++} } END {print "Total status D: "count}'
top - 11:53:48 up 5 days, 18:47, 1 user, load average: 3.00, 3.00, 3.00 Tasks: 132 total, 1 running, 131 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie Cpu(s): 0.2%us, 12.3%sy, 3.8%ni, 83.3%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Mem: 2075620k total, 1773432k used, 302188k free, 395648k buffers Swap: 2650684k total, 716k used, 2649968k free, 1165208k cached PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 8548 root 20 0 2296 684 576 D 0 0.0 0:00.00 find 8675 root 20 0 2296 684 576 D 0 0.0 0:00.00 find 32070 root 20 0 2296 688 576 D 0 0.0 0:00.00 find Total status D: 3 tempe:~# killall -9 find
After that, the load average immediately began dropping back to normal.
