High Load

[James Gray]

Pete wrote:
> Mike Kercher wrote:
>
>
>>I'm seeing a HUGE load on my system and I can't figure out why.
>>
>>14:47:00  up 46 min,  3 users,  load average: 13.43, 14.25, 10.73
>>102 processes: 87 sleeping, 12 running, 3 zombie, 0 stopped
>>CPU states:  75.6% user  24.3% system   0.0% nice   0.0% iowait   0.0% idle
>>Mem:  1022796k av,  915824k used,  106972k free,       0k shrd,   43448k
>>buff
>>                   522344k actv,  197376k in_d,  127288k in_c
>>Swap: 2048276k av,   31672k used, 2016604k free                  441600k
>>cached
>>
>> PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU COMMAND
>>9837 root      15   0 14808  952   820 S    68.5  0.0   3:25   0
>>MailScanner
>>15534 hbaldera  23   0     0    0     0 Z     0.7  0.0   0:00   0 cucipop
>><defunct>

**SNIPPED**

> Why does your machine use swap when you have plenty of ram free ?

I've often seen my *nix boxen swap stuff out to increase cache/buffer
for stuff that is loaded but very rarely used (like lpd).  I remember
doing some exercises with this on Solaris when I did my Sun CSE course
(the idea was performance tuning a server with very high I/O and low
application memory requirements - think BIG ftp/mail server).  Never
touched it since then but is is possible to skew the memory management
to "prefer" buffer/cache in certain circumstances.

Cheers,

James

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