I figgured out what the problem was, --this time--, but it would still be nice to better understand the general case. This time, it was gpm was hung up in the middle of reading the mouse when the keyboard-mouse-display switch was flipped to another machine, so the mouse got pulled at an inoportune moment. Very interesting! Robert Brown writes: > I am experiencing a problem, the general form of which occurs from > time to time on various systems of mine. The system shows a load, but > top shows a virtually idle cpu: > > > 22:51:44 up 2:17, 2 users, load average: 1.01, 1.01, 0.96 > 40 processes: 37 sleeping, 3 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: 0.5% user 1.9% system 0.0% nice 0.0% iowait 97.4% idle > Mem: 60600k av, 48296k used, 12304k free, 0k shrd, 8708k buff > 34744k actv, 0k in_d, 184k in_c > Swap: 522104k av, 252k used, 521852k free 25896k cached > > > There are no nfs mounted filesystems. This particular box is a > firewall, so it it dual-homed, and it runs l2tpd to establish a tunnel > with a remote network, but that is only this particular instance. I > see systems rom time to time that exhibit a load that is not > associated with any noticable cpu use. I know the kernel can get > unhappy about certain resources other than just cpu utilization, but > how can I determine what is causing a load like this when the cpu is > idle? > > Generally, is there some well defined way to find what is throwing a > load on a box. I guess a closely related questions is: How is "load" > computed? If I knew all the factors that affect this mysterious > number, I would better be able to figure this out. > > -- > -------- "And there came a writing to him from Elijah" [2Ch 21:12] -------- > R. J. Brown III rj@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.elilabs.com/~rj voice 859 567-7311 > Elijah Laboratories Inc. P. O. Box 166, Warsaw KY 41095 fax 859 567-7311 > ----- M o d e l i n g t h e M e t h o d s o f t h e M i n d ------ > > > -- > redhat-list mailing list > unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe > https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list > -- redhat-list mailing list unsubscribe mailto:redhat-list-request@xxxxxxxxxx?subject=unsubscribe https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
