100-200 load average on an idle system: Help!

[James Gray]

Rilindo Foster wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2007, at 2:16 AM, James Gray wrote:
> 
>>
>> Snipped :)
>>
>> All very interesting but not particularly useful :(  You're showing us 
>> the top 
>> output which says there are approx 127 processes in the run queue but 
>> only 2 
>> are currently running.  That leads me to think you have something that is 
>> waiting for I/O of some sort.
>
 > if it is an I/O problem, perhaps can we get some sort of confirmation
 > like so:
 >
 > iostat -c 60
 >
 > ?

(Top posting fixed - don't top-post)

Quite possible, however, I've found in my experience that looking a 
tree-view of the process table in these sort of circumstances generally 
yields better results than running down the I/O path alone.  There are 
more reasons, than just process waiting on I/O, that will result in high 
system load but low CPU utilisation.

Cheers,

James