console locked again:: load over 2.00

[Bill Moran]

In response to Gary Kline <kline at thought.org>:
> 
> Any ideas *why* my load is so high when my desktop wasn't touched for 9, 10 hours?
> I was running mostly KDE3 konsoles, and had a few other processes going, the
> apps iconisized.  The server is still running; I've killed everything I can think of
> to reduce the load.  It may be that the screen won't come back if the load is >
> 1.00.  I'm upgrading my kernel to see if *that* has any effect.  O/wise, I'm out of
> ideas.

Doesn't sound right at all.  I've seen my load avgs go much higher than
2 on my desktop and not had much difficulty logging in.

Generally, slow logins are a symptom of IO starvation, as an inability
to get to a disk page is more of a show stopper than contention for
CPU resources.  How much of your swap is in use?  What are the pagein/
pageout statistics during this?  Are you sure the disk isn't dying?

-- 
Bill Moran
http://www.potentialtech.com