cpu eater

[Alan McKinnon]

On Sunday 12 March 2006 20:31, Robbo wrote:
> Can't find these in the manual but a google found...
>
> us  regular user apps
> sy  system (general kernel stuff)
> ni  nice user apps (low-priority tasks)
> id  idle
> wa  waiting for IO to complete
> hi  hard interrupt (IRQ) handlers
> si  soft interrupt (network stack, mostly?) handlers
>
>
> wa, mainly means waiting on hardware (?), check with the "dmesg"
> command and the file /var/log/messages to see if your getting any
> errors, etc.

Technically, that means the process is blocked for IO. A read or write 
has been started and is taking a long time to complete. It doesn't 
have to be to a physical disk, it just has to be IO (to network 
mounts count too).

Alec, how many files in that dir, and how big are they. What kind of 
file system are they on? This info won't provide the answers, but 
might indicate where to look further.

alan

>
> On 12 Mar 2006, at 17:52, Alex wrote:
> > Hallo boys and girls,
> > Lately I noticed that something/someone is eating up my cpu.
> > ie. when I launch digikam (with a lot of photos) here's what's
> > going on:
> >
> > alex at playland:~$ top
> > top - 19:12:45 up  2:33,  1 user,  load average: 2.95, 1.41, 0.87
> > Tasks:  84 total,   1 running,  83 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0
> > zombie Cpu(s):  2.3% us,  0.7% sy,  0.0% ni,  0.0% id, 96.7% wa, 
> > 0.0% hi,  0.3% si
> > Mem:    516300k total,   508124k used,     8176k free,    41436k
> > buffers
> > Swap:  1510068k total,    12532k used,  1497536k free,   153944k
> > cached
> >
> >   PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+ 
> > COMMAND 8652 root      15   0  343m  85m 3580 S  0.3 17.0  
> > 4:08.83 Xorg 8928 alex      15   0  101m  48m  25m S  0.3  9.7  
> > 2:25.94 amarokapp 14460 alex      16   0  2128 1084  844 R  0.3 
> > 0.2   0:00.06 top 1 root      16   0  1560  528  460 S  0.0  0.1 
> >  0:01.10 init 2 root      34  19     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0  
> > 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
> >     3 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.17
> > events/0 4 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.01
> > khelper 5 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00
> > kthread 7 root      20  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00
> > kacpid 123 root      10  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.31
> > kblockd/0 149 root      15   0     0    0    0 D  0.0  0.0  
> > 0:00.26 pdflush 150 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0 
> >  0:01.03 pdflush 152 root      11  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0
> >   0:00.00 aio/0 151 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0 
> >  0:00.71 kswapd0 737 root      15   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0
> >   0:00.00 kseriod
> >
> >
> > No process is using more than 0.3% of the cpu but there is 96.7%
> > wa.
> >
> > For starters wtf is that wa? :)
> > and for a second question, do you have any ideas of what could be
> > causing
> > this, where to look or what more info you might need? (I know
> > these are three
> > questions... :) )
> >
> > ubuntu-5.10/linux-2.6.12-10-k7
> > --
> > Cheers, Alex
> > --
> > ubuntu-users mailing list
> > ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five