Determining what is causing a high load reported by check_load plugin

Daniel Wittenberg daniel.wittenberg.r0ko at statefarm.com
Mon Dec 6 22:39:45 CET 2010


In top, does it show the same load values?  The status of your memory
shouldn't cause the nagios plugin to report high cpu.  What does the
uptime command say?  Try running the check_load script by hand on that
host and verify it returns the same results.


Dan

 

 

From: Marc Powell [mailto:lists at xodus.org] 
Sent: Monday, December 06, 2010 3:26 PM
To: Nagios Users List
Subject: Re: [Nagios-users] Determining what is causing a high load
reported by check_load plugin

 

 

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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