On a fresh Linode 512 deployed with Debian 6 I see an odd thing with loadavg when running kernel 2.6.38-linode31 (latest paravirt). System utilities like 'top' and 'uptime' will show:

Load: 0.00 0.01 0.05

That's the "low water mark" so to speak. The 5-minute and 15-minute never drop.

The linode is lightly loaded. If I reboot to an earlier paravirt kernel and give it a little while to settle down, I'll see:

Load: 0.00 0.00 0.00

Is this just a quirk that I shouldn't lose sleep over?

Here's a current 'top' output, running 2.6.38-linode31:

top - 09:34:54 up 2 days,  9:48,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.05
Tasks:  73 total,   1 running,  72 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni,100.0%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    509868k total,   490224k used,    19644k free,    39860k buffers
Swap:   262140k total,        0k used,   262140k free,   371964k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
    1 root      20   0  2084  704  604 S    0  0.1   0:02.85 init
    2 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.01 ksoftirqd/0
    4 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:03.72 kworker/0:0
    5 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.03 kworker/u:0
    6 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    7 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/1
    8 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/1:0
    9 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 ksoftirqd/1
   10 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/2
   11 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:02.94 kworker/2:0
   12 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/2
   13 root      RT   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/3
   14 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.00 kworker/3:0
   15 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0   0:00.02 ksoftirqd/3

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sleddog

Try using your Linode for additional tasks, like running a web server, or perhaps a mail server.

 08:26:52 up 31 days, 11:42,  0 users,  load average: 0.53, 0.28, 0.25

That will drown out the noise -rt

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Thanks, that was helpful.

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sleddog

I'm seeing the same thing. 24 linodes running CentOS show the same idle load of 0.00, 0.01, 0.05.

2.6.32 goes to 0.00 0.00 0.00 but the .38 doesn't.

Sorry, I misreported the "latest paravirt" kernel version above. It's 2.6.38-3-linode32.

2.6.38-3-linode32: idle load stuck at 0.00 0.01 0.05.

2.6.38-linode31: idle load goes to 0.00 0.00 0.00.

Just for the record

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sleddog