From: ldg@ulysium.net
Date: Tue Jun 10 2003 - 17:13:45 EDT
Hello all,
just a quick question:
I've been running 5.1b for about 6 months now and I noticed it rarely goes
to a load average close to 0 even when the system really is idling and I see
the kernel using quite a bit of cpu time periodically while idling as well:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY S STARTED TIME
COMMAND
root 0 12.5 2.9 1.37G 37M ?? R < 11:58:09 49:16.12
[kernel idle]
load average: 0.14, 0.10, 0.10
The load average stay a lot around 0.10 and 0.20 even when most tasks are
shut down and there's no load on the system.
This is on a dual processor 1200 with 1.25gig of ram, which I haven't even
seen swapping yet, because it hasn't been loaded enough to use up much
resources.
What could make the kernel take up around 12% cpu time while the system is
just idling?
The only things running in the background are the basic daemons and maybe
vfast once in a while. I doubt that cron or inetd or any other such daemons
would be grabbing that much cpu, and it wouldn't register as cpu time used
by the kernel anyway.
So what could it be?
Would vfast's cpu usage show up in the kernel's cpu usage?
Even if it was vfast, when the system has been idling for a while, all the
vfast tasks should be done with and the load average should come back down
to near 0 on an idling system...
-- Didier Godefroy mailto:dg@ulysium.net
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