high average load and kernel recompilation

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2009-02-21 at 18:58 +0100, Pol wrote:
> It is hp tc4200 laptop, 1.7 GHz 

Ah, a tablet. I know that one from the company, it's pretty slow. It's a
single-core CPU, right (Intel Pentium M 760?)

> (but i am used to keep it in 'powersave'
> mode, at 0.8GHz) , 

What does this mean? AFAIK Ubuntu (and I would guess Kubuntu) uses an
on-demand CPU governor by default. That is, it will let the CPU run at
full speed whenever needed, but throttle it otherwise. This is
independent from whether the laptop is plugged in or not.

So, my question would be, did you change that, and do you keep your CPU
throttled to a fixed speed even if you have high load? In this case you
should look no further for now and see whether the load continues to be
so high on average even it the CPU runs at full speed. After all, you'd
be throttling it to less than half its (less than spectacular as it is)
speed.

> As i log in, several system services are started: postfix, dovecot, dictd,
> hpoj, wooffle, collectd. I one of my attempts, proxy was disabled in
> webbrowsers, with no change in performance, so my guess is that wwwoffle
> should not affect the average load.
> After log in, a few applets (kbandwidth, clock, calendar, systray), two
> konsoles monitoring log files with 'tail -f', amarok are started and, from
> a few more konsole sessions, 'sudo su' to four more users. 
> So, there are five users, each of which starts konqueror, connects to gmail,
> opens a few pdf files, starts kalarm and kgmailnotifier; sometimes lyx
> editors and maxima (symbolic computations, spending most of the time as
> idle) are started.
> One of those users starts ktorrent; another one starts knode; another one
> starts firefox (connecting to gmail and opening several google notebooks)

Um. You are running 5 users concurrently from a tc 4200 (possibly even
throttled?) and you complain about an average load of 5?

I run one user on an HP nc6400 (2GB RAM) with evolution, terminal(s),
firefox, liferea, video player, and transmission.  I currently have load
average: 0.22, 0.81, 1.42

I dunno, to me this sounds like "to be expected", but maybe someone else can chip in,

> 2.6.24-23-generic

That's fine, you won't get any noticabe difference over the "generic"
flavor by recompiling, I don't think.