17 JanHigh load average but low CPU usage

One 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.

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One Response to “High load average but low CPU usage”

  1. apanloco says:

    Thanks alot. I just had a 0.5 load average and 0% cpu usage. This trick revealed that I forgot to unmount a samba connection to a device that was no longer available:

    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    9097 root 20 0 0 0 0 D 0 0.0 1:45.06 cifsd
    Total status D: 1

    Unmounting that got my load down to 0. <3

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