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In a newly installed server (Debian 8), the average load never goes under 1 beside the fact there is almost nothing runnning, %CPU usage is always at 0%.

After some search I found the process hwrng (parent process = kthreadd) may be the cause, but I don't know how to prevent that.

Here the first lines of the top :

top - 11:26:02 up 16:51,  1 user,  load average: 1.00, 1.02, 1.05
Tasks:  86 total,   1 running,  85 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  2.7 us,  1.3 sy,  0.0 ni, 96.0 id,  0.0 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:   1007204 total,   898320 used,   108884 free,    92112 buffers
KiB Swap:   524284 total,     2324 used,   521960 free.   296008 cached Mem

And the ps aux|grep D output:

USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root       537  0.0  0.0      0     0 ?        D    Jul29   0:00 [hwrng]

ps axo stat,euid,ruid,tty,tpgid,sess,pgrp,ppid,pid,pcpu,comm|grep 'hwrng\|kthreadd'

STAT  EUID  RUID TT       TPGID  SESS  PGRP  PPID   PID %CPU COMMAND
D        0     0 ?           -1     0     0     2   537  0.0 hwrng
S        0     0 ?           -1     0     0     0     2  0.0 kthreadd

On an other server installed at the same time (and same distrib), this process is not present and the load average is most of time 0.

1 Answer 1

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Hardware and virtual servers may get low on true randomness entropy. Debian explain this in their wiki article BoottimeEntropyStarvation and there are a few suggestions how to fix this. If you end up with "haveged", you can review the tutorial How to Setup Additional Entropy for Cloud Servers Using Haveged by Digital Ocean.

If "haveged" doesn't start on your Debian system due to AppArmor profile issues, review Debian bug #911604 which suggests a quick fix.

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