Who’s got the biggest load average?
Ever wondered what can be the highest load average on the unix-like system? Do we even know what this parameter tells about? It shows the average number of either actively running or waiting processes. It should be close to the number of logical processors present on the system, otherwise, in case it is greater than this, some things will need to wait in order to be executed.
So I was testing 1000 LXC containers on the 2 x 6 core Xeon system (totalling as 24 logical processors) and leave it for a while. Once I got back I saw that there is something wrong with system responsiveness.
And my load average was 1min: 5719, 5 min: 2642, 15 min: 1707. I think that this the highest I have ever seen on systems under my supervision. What is interesing is that the system was not totally unresponsive, rather it was a little sluggish. Proxmox UI recorded load up to somewhere around 100 which should be a quite okey value. But then it sky-rocketed and Proxmox lost its ability to keep track of it.
I managed to login into the system and at that moment load average was already at 1368/2030/1582, which is way less than a few minutes before. I tried to cancel top command and reboot it, but even such trival operation was too much at that time.
Once I managed to initiate system restart it started to shut down all those 1000 LXC containers present on the system. It took somwhere around 20 minutes to shut everything down and proceed with reboot.
