Is it normal to have the "hi" (hard interrupt) CPU usage indicator at or near 100% all the time? (shown while running top).

I'm on host16 and I have virtually no processes of my own running (except for top and sshd, of course). I did notice that it was running sluggishly for a while, but it seems ok as far as response time now.

I just got this Linode192 a few days ago, and what worries me is that I would ever have any sluggishness before I have even started running Apache, Mysql, mod_perl, etc.

I was under the impression that the whole IO limiter thing would severly reduce the impact of "swap thrashers" on the host, so what would be causing a lag with my virtually unused system?

In case it matters, I am running Gentoo with the 2.6.12.1-linode13 kernel. Thanks for any info anyone can give.

It doesn't do it, at all, for me on my 128 linode, host 48.

top - 04:31:42 up 4 days, 3:54, 2 users, load average: 1.00, 1.00, 1.00
Tasks: 114 total, 2 running, 112 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.4% us, 0.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 0.0% id, 0.0% wa, 99.6% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 123292k total, 121120k used, 2172k free, 2084k buffers
Swap: 132088k total, 75644k used, 56444k free, 26488k cached

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Jay Faulkner
http://oldos.org