Load average looks high on a freshly installed, idle system

[Carlos Capriotti]

Hello all.

I have two Dell T610 working side by side. Same processor and memory configuration, albeit different generations. Both on the same firmware level as well. PERCs are not the same. "Problem-system" uses a H700 and "control-system" uses a 6/i.

I noticed that, no matter what I do on problem-system, its load average is always high, above 0.5. From what I read, this means 50% of my processor power being used. Top shows nothing interesting, but confirms the load readings.

This system, currently, only has FreeNAS 9.3-release installed and that's that. No further configuration, but just before that it was fully set, with ZVOL, dataset, networking, etc. In short, makes no difference.

Except for BIOS settings (it is a remote system; I'll check this on Monday) I cannot think of anything else.

As a matter of fact, I've never seen this before. And what worries the most is that I intended to promote this server to my main production server. Well, not anymore.

FreeNAS specific ? Hard to say remotely, but since all of you have exposure to "creepy" things, it is worth a shot.

Has anyone seen something similar ? Inputs really welcome.

 

[DifferentStrokes]

Remember that a 1.00 load average is 100% load of 1 CPU core. If you have a 4 core machine then a 4.00 is 100% load on the machine.

I'm not sure if your machines have the 4 or 6 core CPU and if you have 1 or 2 processors. As an example though, if you have 1 - 4 core processor than a load average of .5 would really be an overall utilization of 12.5%. If for example you have the 2 - 6 core machine a load average of .5 would be 4% utilization.

If you run top and then press "P" it will show you all of your cores. You can look at a break down of the CPU core percentages here.

 

[Carlos Capriotti]

That is correct. I misunderstood the article I read, and thought 1.00 was the total capacity, for all installed processors.

Here is a good article. Again, my fault I misunderstood it.

http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2009/07/31/understanding-load-averages

STILL, if I compare those very similar systems, and take into consideration that the problem-system is freshly installed, with NO configuration except for fixed IP, instead of DHCP, and also that the control-system shows loads no higher than 0.2... Well, the question is still valid.

Thanks for you input.

Any other takers ?