Linux – Diagnosing high CPU waiting

I would check the cronjobs running on your host. In fact if you have a virt and on the same physical host there is another virt using for example the sata drives bandwidth and you want to write in the same time to the disk, it can cause bigger load then usual it would be on a single non-virtualized, non-shared environment. It is true for any IO operation. Btw. would you mind to press 1 when you are in top just to see all the cores. It seems there is no real load on your host at least there is no IOwait or any kind of reason why we can see thos 3.00 load. I am curious what can you see on both cores you have. Also if you can install dstat and run it to check what is going on.

I would recommend searching for anything non in the S sleeping state. It's possible you've got zombie processes which can get counted as something running, despite not really doing anything. ps -eo pid,user,state,cmd | awk '$3 !~ /S/ {print $0}' This will show any non-sleeping processes. (Running, waiting on IO, zombied, etc)

It's worth noting that your load average isn't terribly alarming. Assuming you have more than two cores on the box, there's no doubt plenty of CPU power to go around. But obviously still worth looking into if you don't expect 1-2 processes running at any given time.


--Christopher Karel