Load Averages in the 7's??

Has anyone had this problem?

I was driving home yesteday, I went to turn up the volume (Megadeth if your wondering, ) Moved the volume knob, and almost 3 seconds later the player responded. I used the Hijack menu, checked the Vital Stats, and saw Unix load averages in the 7's straight accross the line.

I have never seen a unix load average this high on any unix machine that I've messed around with.. Any idea on what would cause this?

The file I was playing was a .wma 192k song file, I had the player set to Info Track, I don't remember what visual it was set to.

The player is a MK2a 30 g, Beta-13 with Hijack v291

-Dist

I've seen very high load averages on almost-idle machines, when their NFS servers have disappeared. The kernel's idea of what is a "runnable" process includes things that are waiting on short-term events, IIRC.

I think that there's a problem somewhere with the player causing lots of threads to block like this, but I don't know how to investigate it. I think that this is what is causing very slow UI processing when the player is reading from disk, and the "low-battery" indicator to appear when coming out of pause, though I can't back up these beliefs.

Could it be related to the fix for stuck jiffies?

saw Unix load averages in the 7's ... I have never seen a unix load average this high on any unix machine

You haven't worked on Unix machines a very long time, have you? My top observed load average was around 140. That was a lot of fun to fix.

Can anyone beat about 640? (without deliberately trying to, that is.) Somewhere I've stored the output of uptime that gave well over 600 as the load average. I'll see if I can find it. This was on a machine at university, with a lot of students compiling programs, and then learning the hard way how NOT to use fork().

Richard.

My top observed load average was around 140.

I've seen 100 on my home machine... I was compiling Mozilla (I think -- something very big anyway) and quit the compile, which caused make to turn into a fork bomb. Nothing short of "killall make" got rid of it.

Peter

Can anyone beat about 640?

Nope, but I have seen above 240. That was on a heavily loaded quad processor Sun E420 running (in the loose sense of the word) oracle. The scary thing is that it was pretty usable to well over 100. Also seen our mail servers break 100 due to heavy iowait a time or two.

-Mike