[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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