From owner-freebsd-stable Thu Sep 7 13:45:35 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Received: from kci.kciLink.com (kci.kciLink.com [204.117.82.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 7A05937B422 for ; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 13:45:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from onceler.kciLink.com (onceler.kciLink.com [204.117.82.2]) by kci.kciLink.com (Postfix) with ESMTP id 83356E881 for ; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 16:45:31 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from khera@localhost) by onceler.kciLink.com (8.11.0/8.11.0) id e87KjVk45603; Thu, 7 Sep 2000 16:45:31 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from khera) From: Vivek Khera MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14775.65131.298732.839601@onceler.kciLink.com> Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2000 16:45:31 -0400 (EDT) To: stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Odd Load average problem In-Reply-To: References: <39B7F42D.7BA8BDB9@columbus.rr.com> X-Mailer: VM 6.72 under 21.1 (patch 11) "Carlsbad Caverns" XEmacs Lucid Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >>>>> "IS" == Ian Smith writes: IS> For what it's worth, I've noticed this occasionally over a couple of IS> years on a 2.2.6 box; same, seems like 1.00 has been added to the load IS> average, lasts for hours, goes away. Thought it'd be fixed ages ago :) There was a big discussion about this on the bsdi-users mailing list a year or so ago. The gist of the problem was that on x86 architecture, you don't have enough timers to measure the system without affecting the system. Something about needing to make the resolution of the measuring timer be relatively prime to the scheduling timer. Thus, it is possible for the two logical timers to get in sync and artifically increase the load. Usually running some CPU intensive job breaks the synchronization. This is from memory, so may be slightly inaccurate, and may not apply to FreeBSD, though I suspect it does considering the issue was with the hardware capabilities. -- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Vivek Khera, Ph.D. Khera Communications, Inc. Internet: khera@kciLink.com Rockville, MD +1-301-545-6996 GPG & MIME spoken here http://www.khera.org/~vivek/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message