> First, run something like "top" to see if anything is taking up > processor time. If you notice a process using about 95% of the processor, > this would be the problem. > > > Should I be looking for any other problems that I might not be aware of? > Yes. Some processes can go into uninteruptable sleep. They stay in > the run queue (and hence increase the load) but they don't suck up all > of the available processor cycles. I had a problem with these when I > tried to gunzip a file on a bad filesystem. I'm not sure how the > filesystem got corrupted while mounted -- but the process could not > be killed, and I had to reboot so that I could unmount the partition and > check it with fsck.
Thanks John, and Paul. I found a process which seemed to be a tar with some strange switches that just wouldn't die with a kill -9. Reboot took care of it, and load is now at its happy average of 0 or just above. I hereby promise not to abandon the list when I can answer questions such as these for other novices. :-) You can hold me to that one! Is there any plan to have a debian-newbie to take some of the load off of debian-user? It seems that the tone of the list has taken a little dip as the volume has increased. Don't get me wrong, this list is my fave! Folks on the whole are just fabulous, however, there _have_ been a couple of hot messages in the past few weeks. Rich M [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to [EMAIL PROTECTED] . Trouble? e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
