Troubleshooting high load average on Linux
Posted by Martin Bach on June 25, 2013
This morning I was quite surprised to see one of my lab servers suffering from a high load average. To be fair I haven’t looked at it for a while, it’s just one of these demo systems ticking along … However this was an interesting case!
High load averages are usually first felt when you get sluggish response from the terminal. I got very sluggish response but attributed it to the SSH connection. Nope, it turned out that the other VMs were a lot more responsive, and I know that they are on the same host.
A few options exist in Linux to see what is going on. The uptime command is a pretty good first indicator.
# uptime 09:14:05 up 28 days, 11:29, 1 user, load average: 19.13, 19.15, 19.13
OK so this has been going on for a little while (hey remember its my lab server!). But what’s contributing? The next stop was top for me. Here’s the abridged output:
# top -b -n 1 | head top - 03:11:40 up 28 days, 11:32, 1 user, load average: 19.08, 19.15, 19.13 Tasks: 217 total, 1 running, 215 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie Cpu0 : 5.5%us, 2.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 91.0%id, 0.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.5%si, 0.0%st Cpu1 : 1.5%us, 1.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu2 : 1.1%us, 0.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu3 : 0.8%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.4%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu4 : 1.5%us, 1.1%sy, 0.0%ni, 97.3%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu5 : 1.1%us, 0.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu6 : 0.8%us, 0.7%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.5%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu7 : 0.6%us, 0.6%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st Cpu8 : 2.9%us, 1.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 95.3%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st ... Swap: 4194304k total, 0k used, 4194304k free, 4194302k cached
The interesting bit here is that the CPUs are mostly idle. No single process consumed more than a few percent of CPU, most a lot less actually. Only 1 zombie process listed so that’s not an issue either. In 2.4 kernels zombie processes could cause problems because they a) sometimes couldn’t be killed (“super zombies”) and b) easily could hog a CPU. No swap is in use which in combination with the absence of kswapd activity allowed me to discard a memory shortage.
I have seen high load averages in the past as the result of database activity (lots of sessions with lots of nested loop joins hammering the CPUs with access requests to the same set of hot blocks) or swapping. Both could be ruled out here. Swapping would most likely show as high %SYS percentages. Additionally poorly performing Oracle queries would also show up using %USR cycles and list high in the output of top.
So maybe it’s something else then?
So it had to be something else then. If the CPUs are idle then maybe what’s contributing to the load is a “hung” process with high priority or maybe something generating a lot of I/O.
Two approaches came to my mind:
- using iotop
- using top in batch mode and filtering processes in suspicious states
The output of iotop was not revealing any further clues to the problem so I carried on with a suggestion I found using my favorite search engine. The suggestion was to filter the output of top for processes in state “D”. According to the man page of top, the following states are defined
w: S -- Process Status
The status of the task which can be one of:
’D’ = uninterruptible sleep
’R’ = running
’S’ = sleeping
’T’ = traced or stopped
’Z’ = zombie
So a process in state D is in uninterruptible sleep-that does not sound too good because if anything is in an uninterruptible sleep then it hogs the CPU. Running the following on the server revealed the culprits very quickly:
> top -n 1 -b | egrep "PID|updatedb" PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 1535 root 39 19 3868 796 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 7138 root 39 19 3868 788 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 8246 root 39 19 3868 768 508 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.57 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 9279 root 39 19 3868 788 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 12125 root 39 19 3868 772 508 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 12860 root 39 19 3868 772 508 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 13480 root 39 19 3868 788 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 14632 root 39 19 3868 796 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 16745 root 39 19 3868 788 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 18962 root 20 0 61192 716 624 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 egrep PID|updatedb 19052 root 39 19 3868 788 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 19988 root 39 19 3868 792 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.01 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 21520 root 39 19 3868 796 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 26830 root 39 19 3868 788 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 27192 root 39 19 3868 768 508 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 28528 root 39 19 3868 796 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 29751 root 39 19 3868 768 508 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 32080 root 39 19 3868 772 508 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 32386 root 39 19 3868 792 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ... 32649 root 39 19 3868 792 524 D 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 /usr/bin/updatedb -f ...
There are 19 of these processes occupying the machine. Although they literally don’t do anything, their process state is worrying me. And I only have 8 threads in total, so 19 is definitely too high a number. I decided to use a kill -9 approach removing the processes from the system. At worst it would leave me with a stale index for use with locate. And sure enough the load average went down.
# uptime 09:18:22 up 28 days, 13:03, 2 users, load average: 0.53, 3.72, 11.54
RESULT!
Oh, I should have said that updatedb is part of the findutils-locate package, updatedb indexes your disk allowing you to run “locate -i ” to find a file without running a find command across “/”. The call to updatedb is scheduled in /etc/cron.daily/mlocate.cron. I didn’t spend time to find out why the processes got stuck
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