Comments on: Load Average > 680

By: miljan

miljan — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 19:54:39 +0000

4200 LUNs? Was someone playing with the zoning or what?

By: ezaton

ezaton — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 16:13:09 +0000

I have had (but no screenshots) a system with load average of about 10000. It was a massive fork bomb caused by udev behavior when detecting ~4200 storage LUNs. If I am not mistaken, each udev detection process (one per each block device) has two children, so you can do the math here. The system had 16 physical cores (HT was disabled), and it was very sluggish during that time.
When I was able to login to it (it was part of a normal reboot process, the slow wake-up caused by the huge amount of storage LUNs), I have had the pleasure of capturing the ‘top’ command showing all processes on screen with the value ’9999′ on the CPU column. I was sure the cdrom will burst and I will be able to fill my hands with coins.
I did not :-/

By: Marica

Marica — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:51:34 +0000

Meni je zapravo fascinantan tvoj wallpaper :) Zaprepascujuce, kako se neke stvari uopste ne menjaju :P

By: miljan

miljan — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:44:13 +0000

Hehehe… seems this happens quite a lot. Nice to see it is not limited to Linux only. :)

@br41n, I was lucky enough to know what the problem was so I could react very fast. :)

@dave, this happened on a one CPU, PIII machine so there is nothing to divide here. :)

@niall, you really know how to kill a machine. Good job. :)

@julien, MySQL was also the problem in my case. Or rather bad usage of MySQL. One customer with a very popular web site stored images inside of MySQL – not references to images, but full freakin’ images! And since it was a web site for a gossip newspapers you can imaging how much images there were on each page! :)

By: Julien.

Julien. — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:00:12 +0000

That server can sure use some mysql tuning…

http://imgur.com/f8WMM.png

By: Niall

Niall — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:18:17 +0000

I’ve had 2941. This was achieved by compiling a linux kernel with ‘make -j’ on a fairly massive ramdisk.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 17:01:20 +0000

I have seen a Solaris box hit both 700 and 1200 (roughly) but these numbers are not necessarily directly comparable to yours. Different operating systems report that number differently depending on how many processors you have.

I think those boxes would have both had 8 (4 dual core) but we also had some that had 24 and my memory is not accurate enough to be sure which one I was on.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have the presence of mind to take a screen shot.

By: br41n

br41n — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:36:54 +0000

i got around 900 few times this year on few boxes :|
debugging it sux

By: Marko M

Marko M — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 09:33:42 +0000

Oh, I have seen one FreeBSD server surviving load over 800. “680″ is the second highest load I’ve ever heard of.