cpuspeed causing high load average?
 

On a new server's CentOS5 install, with nothing in the way of applications
running yet, I noticed that the load average was sitting between 2 and 5
all the time, even though top told me CPU was 100% idle.

Eventually I found that stopping the "cpuspeed" subsystem allowed the
load average to drop down to near zero, as I would expect it to be.

I have the default /etc/sysconfig/cpuspeed with no customizations.

Is the above behaviour expected? It seems wrong to me. Is cpuspeed broken?

I did notice that with cpuspeed running, the CPUs were running at their
minimum frequency of 1.6GHz, and after stopping the cpuspeed service
they went up to their maximum speed of 2.8GHz.

The system has a pair of E5660 Xeons, which Linux reports as 24 CPUs!

Cheers
Tony
--
Tony Mountifield
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cpuspeed causing high load average?
 

On 05/15/2012 01:05 PM, Tony Mountifield wrote:
> Eventually I found that stopping the "cpuspeed" subsystem allowed the
> load average to drop down to near zero, as I would expect it to be.

and what impact did that have on your power consumption ? And did it
make a difference to the performance of the machine ?

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cpuspeed causing high load average?
 

In article <4FB3628A.4050300@karan.org>,
Karanbir Singh <mail-lists@karan.org> wrote:
> On 05/15/2012 01:05 PM, Tony Mountifield wrote:
> > Eventually I found that stopping the "cpuspeed" subsystem allowed the
> > load average to drop down to near zero, as I would expect it to be.
>
> and what impact did that have on your power consumption ? And did it
> make a difference to the performance of the machine ?

It's too early to say, since it is a new box that I am just setting up.
I would expect it to consume a little more power, since the CPU will be
running at full speed, but to perform better.

Since it will be a high-traffic SIP server running Asterisk, I expect
running cpuspeed would be a bit pointless anyway.

But that wasn't my main point, which was why cpuspeed should cause an
abnormally high load average on this system.

Cheers
Tony
--
Tony Mountifield
Work: tony@softins.co.uk - http://www.softins.co.uk
Play: tony@mountifield.org - http://tony.mountifield.org
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cpuspeed causing high load average?
 

On 05/16/2012 09:03 PM, Tony Mountifield wrote:
> In article<4FB3628A.4050300@karan.org>,
> Karanbir Singh<mail-lists@karan.org> wrote:
>> On 05/15/2012 01:05 PM, Tony Mountifield wrote:
>>> Eventually I found that stopping the "cpuspeed" subsystem allowed the
>>> load average to drop down to near zero, as I would expect it to be.
>> and what impact did that have on your power consumption ? And did it
>> make a difference to the performance of the machine ?
> It's too early to say, since it is a new box that I am just setting up.
> I would expect it to consume a little more power, since the CPU will be
> running at full speed, but to perform better.
>
> Since it will be a high-traffic SIP server running Asterisk, I expect
> running cpuspeed would be a bit pointless anyway.
>
> But that wasn't my main point, which was why cpuspeed should cause an
> abnormally high load average on this system.
>
> Cheers
> Tony
just a thought
there is a basic minimum load - when the CPU is at full speed it is a
small % - when the CPU is throttled back to 30% of full speed the
minimum load is a noticeable %??
HTH
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