Massive Load average, nothing in top
2009-05-06
Today the load average of one of our servers was up at over 5. Clearly something was wrong with this single-core virtual machine.
My first tool in these situations is to run up top and see which process is causing the trouble, however in this case none of the processes were using up even 1% of the CPU.
My guess was that something was madly spawning processes that were never around for long enough for top to pick them up. To check this assumption, and find out what the processes are:
# ps axr
'a' lists the processes for all users, 'x' includes daemon processes and 'r' only shows running processes.