On Fri, Jul 24, 2009 at 11:08 AM, Kevin J. Cummings<cummings@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > astropulse is the SETI@Home BOINC client that I run (NICEd to 19). > It only uses "excess cycles" and in the past my load average has never > exceed the 3-5 range, except when I was doing "real" work on the system > (like running firefox, thunderbird, and other real programs), something I > almost never do anymore since I bought myself a laptop. > kill it off, wait a few minutes and see if the load average comes down > > I guess what I'm asking is if only 1 job is grabbing most of the CPU, then > what's causing the system to thrash? (Is a load average of 12 considered a > thrashing system? sendmail thinks it is.) 12 is high. is the system responsive? if it is, then this again points to something that has been nice'd (such as seti), in which case its not a problem, except for sendmail - which I would then configure for higher limits. if its not seti and the system is not very responsive then it could be something continuously spawning short lived processes. these can be hard to spot, run the following and see if the process IDs differ by much bash -c 'echo $$' sleep 5 bash -c 'echo $$' if they differ by much, then something is creating processes too quickly. you can usually spot these by running pstree -plan a couple of times and seeing what the differences are. you may have to do that a couple of times to spot what is causing the problems. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
