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My server Load jump high up top 22, CPU just 50%, RAM 1858/5120. How to know what process couse so high load average. Linux Debian

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Can you update your question with what diagnostics you've already done? ps output? iostat output? actual top output? – polynomial Oct 11 '11 at 2:05
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3 Answers

up vote 4 down vote 
$ grep processor /proc/cpuinfo |wc -l
4

That gives you the number of CPUs on your system. If the load average is higher than this number, but CPU is just 50%, there are good chances that you system is performing a lot of IOs. In which case:

aptitude install iotop

iotop will give you a list of processes consuming disk IOs.

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I have cloud server CPU are 4 nad 50%, after I order 8 CPU use 8 % load average down in 1.5, but if order 7 CPU load average jump to 22 again... when I install iotop gives me error:File "/usr/bin/iotop", line 16, in <module>.... – numb Oct 10 '11 at 16:28
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up vote 2 down vote

How to know what process couse so high load average.

You can use top, press O (o in uppercase), follow by l (CPU Time), and Enter.

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up vote 1 down vote

zombie process can influence load average too, May I suggest :

mike@mike-:~$ ps -eo state |uniq -c
    171 S
      1 R
      1 D
      2 S

--> here you can count the number of process for each state

D (process blocked waiting for a resource)

Z Zombie

--> typical issue for the D status a process using a file on a NFS share who doesnt answer anymore... Hope it helps

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