Hello,

I have a really challanging task of knowing why and host to fix the situation
where at most times the CPU is totally idle and same for IO activity, yet the
load at most times is 16-40+.

For instance at time of writing this: The load is 16 now and linux says:

avg-cpu: %user %nice %sys %iowait %idle
0.49 0.40 0.90 0.00 98.20

(That's a whopping 98.20 idle state!)


How could that possibly be? And could you wonderful folks attempt to offer
me advice on how to find out why load is so high yet almost totally idle activity.

If you need various commands for me to run, let me know.

If there's also any ADMINS (with good status) that are willing to look at this and
think they can figure out this case, let me know. I'll gladly pay.

Thanks.
Andre

LoadAVG could be though of as referring to two things:
1) Number of processes running (using CPU)
2) Number of processes waiting for IO devices (non CPU)

I guess in your case it's a matter of #2 being high. Tracking down the offending bottleneck isn't always so easy (could be a result of many things including disk drives, databases, network drivers, bad hardware, i.e. almost anything!)

Have the memory checked

More than the number of processes, an important matter is to discover which processes are consuming the CPU. It all depends of which programs you have installed.

Try to find the guilty with a simple "top", and observe attentively.

For example, I have high email traffic, and when I was using the script dictAttack.py, my load ascended at 90 and up to 98%. Now I use another type of filters and my load is too low.

JFrech

as sen mentioned. it may not be a CPU issue. and is probably i/o related.

Try shutting down your mail server, and see if the load drops. If that doesnt work try shutting down httpd and see if that works.

let us know what happens!