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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers High Load average | vmstat hints what ? Post 302837581 by jim mcnamara on Friday 26th of July 2013 06:06:55 AM
Old 07-26-2013
This is an impression - not a solution:

You've got a series of issues, it looks like. You have several RT processes, those preempt everybody else. This is not necessarily always bad.

One problem appears to be context switching, often caused when nobody except high priority processes completes a quantum. Or there are loads of low priority processes that get the cpu frequently due to schedule policy and then get booted out.

During context switches, unless there is cpu affinity for the processes playing musical chairs, every context switch potentially involves cache latency. So you MAY get lots of cpu cache thrashing. Even with cpu affinity set you can get thrashing.

This is not so bad when a process gets a full 20ms (example value) quantum. It is murder when most processes get kicked out after 1ms. Because relatively much more cpu time is spent on loading cpu caches, not running the codestream.

IMO the large cpu wait queues speak to that.

Q: what exact OS are you running? and exact CPU's (NUMA?)
Q: what does this server do aside from run ruby, java and nfs?
Q: what is the output of uptime ( or who -r)
Q: can you run sar (set it up to gather data?). We can help
 

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UPTIME(1)							   User Commands							 UPTIME(1)

NAME
uptime - Tell how long the system has been running. SYNOPSIS
uptime [options] DESCRIPTION
uptime gives a one line display of the following information. The current time, how long the system has been running, how many users are currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. This is the same information contained in the header line displayed by w(1). System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptable state. A process in a runnable state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in uninterruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for disk. The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of CPUs in a system, so a load average of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time. OPTIONS
-p, --pretty show uptime in pretty format -h, --help display this help text -s, --since system up since, in yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format -V, --version display version information and exit FILES
/var/run/utmp information about who is currently logged on /proc process information AUTHORS
uptime was written by Larry Greenfield <greenfie@gauss.rutgers.edu> and Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@sunsite.unc.edu> SEE ALSO
ps(1), top(1), utmp(5), w(1) REPORTING BUGS
Please send bug reports to <procps@freelists.org> procps-ng December 2012 UPTIME(1)
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