I just pulled this off my server,
High server load, but the CPU is 50% idle, it just dosnt seem right to me..

vmstat says no swap is beeing used..



4:56pm up 12 days, 4:43, 1 user, load average: 2.94, 2.64, 2.45
109 processes: 105 sleeping, 2 running, 1 zombie, 1 stopped
CPU states: 47.3% user, 2.2% system, 0.0% nice, 50.3% idle
Mem: 1023316K av, 1001632K used, 21684K free, 0K shrd, 238284K buff
Swap: 2096440K av, 56920K used, 2039520K free



Thanks

That seems fine to me. Load isn't always relational to the percentage of idle CPU.

how many cpu's?

They only have one. If they had multiple (4) it would look like this:

CPU0 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 99.0% idle
CPU1 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
CPU2 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
CPU3 states: 0.0% user, 0.0% system, 0.0% nice, 100.0% idle

probably i/o contention.

if for instance a slow hard drive was causing the system to sit on its thumbs(idle) waiting for data transfer, the load would increase and processes would wait (load avg)..

very common

This is nothing to worry about at all . I have seen servers with alot more load then that and still running fine.

Ok,
Intresting, might be the HD...

But thanks everyone.
I can sleep knowing my server is safe...

load is a measure of how many processes are marked as running waiting for their time slice. as long as all of these processes are not contending for the same resources, you may not see any impact on performance at all.

paul