Determining what is causing a high load reported by check_load plugin

[Marc Powell]

On Mon, Dec 6, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Kaplan, Andrew H. <AHKAPLAN at partners.org>wrote:

>  Hi there --
>
> We are running Nagios 3.1.2 server, and the client that is the subject of
> this e-mail is running version 2.6 of the nrpe client.
>
> The check_load plugin, version 1.4, is indicating the past three readings
> are the following:
>
> load average: 71.00, 71.00, 70.95 CRITICAL
>
> The critical threshold of the plugin has been set to the 30, 25, 20
> settings.
>
> When I checked the client in question, the first thing I did was to run the
> top command. The results are shown below:
>
> CPU0 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% system,  0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
> CPU1 states:  0.0% user,  0.0% system,  0.0% nice, 100.0% idle
> CPU2 states:  1.0% user,  4.0% system,  0.0% nice, 93.0% idle
> Mem:  2064324K av, 2032308K used,   32016K free,       0K shrd,  509924K
> buff
> Swap: 2096472K av,   21432K used, 2075040K free                 1035592K
> cached
>
> The one thing that I noticed was the amount of free memory was at
> thirty-two megabytes. I wanted to know if that was
> what was causing the critical status to occur, or if there is something(s)
> else that I should investigate.
>

Memory is not a factor in the load calculation, only the number of processes
running or waiting to run. For at least 15 minutes you had approximately 71
processes either running or ready to run and waiting on CPU resources.
Running top/ps was the right thing to do but you really need to do it when
the problem is occurring to see what's actually using all the CPU resources.
There are far too many reasons why load could be high but it should be easy
for someone familiar with your system to figure it out (at least generally)
while in-the-act.

--
Marc
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