[RndTbl] Load average under RHEL 6.x systems?

Gilbert E. Detillieux gedetil at cs.umanitoba.ca
Wed Apr 11 17:00:34 CDT 2012


Howdy folks!

I asked this at last night's meeting, as my "stumper of the month", but 
didn't get any solutions or leads.  So, I thought I'd ask again here...

After upgrading many of our systems, both workstations and servers, from 
CentOS 5.x to Scientific Linux 6.x, I'm seeing higher load averages on 
idle systems than I used to.  Under EL5, loads would drop to zero and 
pretty much stay there most of the time for idles systems.  Under EL6, 
the load might drop down to 0.1, but doesn't stay there for very long, 
and even on seemingly idle systems, I see loads at or near 1 (sometimes 
even higher than 1 on some of our servers).  It's also intermittent, 
with load averages dropping and climbing on fairly short intervals (of a 
few minutes or so).

Running top, iotop, ftop, iftop, etc. doesn't really point to any major 
culprits.  I've even run PowerTop, and implemented some of its suggested 
improvements, but that didn't make a difference on load.

Just wondering if anyone else has seen similar behaviour with hosts 
running Red Hat and/or Fedora distributions?  Would moving to the 
"tickless" kernel have anything to do with it?  (I.e. does it somehow 
affect the way load averages are calculated?)

Or is it some system service that can be shut down?  (If it is, it's not 
creating an obvious load on its own, that top or ftop would show, but it 
may be affecting something in the kernel...)

Any suggestions?

-- 
Gilbert E. Detillieux		E-mail: <gedetil at muug.mb.ca>
Manitoba UNIX User Group	Web:	http://www.muug.mb.ca/
PO Box 130 St-Boniface		Phone:  (204)474-8161
Winnipeg MB CANADA  R2H 3B4	Fax:    (204)474-7609


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