[Bug 574910] Re: High load averages on Lucid while idling

[Chris]

> John is working on trying to get this fixed. We believe, at this
point,  that it is simply an accounting/reporting problem.

In a word:  NO.

With 10.04 as the base OS on the host and in a VB-vm the load average
issues are tantamount to making the distribution unusable as shipped and
only marginally usable with the latest kernel updates.

Before the release of 10.04 my work environment was:  Host running 8.04
and guests running 9.10, and 9.04 and Win2K3.  My primary guest where I
did my work had 384 meg of ram and it ran Firefox, Thunderbird, several
bash sessions in screen, pigeon,  and a custom java application that
was/is memory hungry.     Things ran fine.

I upgraded my host to 10.04 and made new guests running 10.04.  I
configured everything the same, and did fresh installs and
configurations of the software.   In order to do work I had to increase
the memory to 768Meg on my guests and that helped but did not solve the
issue.   I can not open wireshark captures with out it killing some
other X application.  The load average will randomly increase to 10, 20,
or even 50 and slow down so much it becomes unusable (yet
top/iotop/iftop show little to no processes that are causing the issue)
when doing telephone support.   I keept retrograding kernel  levels in
order to obtain usable systems.  Kernels at or below 2.6.31-18 perform
best, but not at the 9.10 level.

My home system has 9.10 as the base OS with several guests at 9.04,
9.10, and 10.04.  The 10.04 system (violet) has all of the patches and
2.6.32-24.  Violet [think resistor colours]  as of this writing (20:00),
sar shows that from 00:10:01 to 20:00:01 the lowest lavg1 is 0.40 and he
highest is 1.95.  Only 50 of the 125 sar samples are below 1.00, and
only 26 are below 0.70.  This system has been unused since 23:20 the
previous night.   It is running only Firefox, two shells in two tabs of
a gnome terminal and pigeon.  No cron jobs running, no SQL servers
running etc.   With the 2.6.32-24 kernel, with a  load average of 1.20
the system is tolerable but still has sluggish moments as I write this.
This does not describe a system where "accounting errors" are happening.

So:  NO!  It is not 'just accounting errors'.    My 9.xx systems are
running fine as guest VMs in virtualbox.

-- 
High load averages on Lucid while idling
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/574910
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