Just looked at my home Linux server, which from all appearances is working fine. The top tool, as well as uptime both show the load average to be 16! Yet, the CPU is listed as 96.7 % idle, as show below:
top – 13:16:58 up 61 days, 16:12, 3 users, load average: 16.00, 16.01, 16.00
Tasks: 267 total, 1 running, 264 sleeping, 2 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.7% us, 1.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 96.7% id, 0.0% wa, 1.7% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 450988k total, 447500k used, 3488k free, 121676k buffers
Swap: 987988k total, 33216k used, 954772k free, 170976k cached
I’m not sure what is going on with this server. Its actually idle but doesn’t think it is. Very strange.
When I tried coming to the site to comment after reading this entry via Planet TriLUG, the server was non-responsive.
You might need to use the various *stat tools (iostat, mpstat, etc) to narrow down what the heck is going on.
Actually, the MT.Net server is a different server, so I’m not sure what you ran into. Thanks for letting me know, though!