On Mon, Mar 17, 2014 at 11:40:20PM +0000, Ian wrote:
> Rodrigo Campos said:
>
> top - 23:31:42 up 3 days, 10:07, 15 users, load average: 1.13, 0.87, 1.13
> Tasks: 254 total, 2 running, 252 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> %Cpu(s): 7.7 us, 1.4 sy, 0.0 ni, 53.3 id, 37.6 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si,
> 0.0 st
> KiB Mem: 16022464 total, 6679952 used, 9342512 free, 466836 buffers
> KiB Swap: 16600060 total, 11056 used, 16589004 free, 1305176 cached
>
> PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 20 0 2470m 1.7g 53m S 24.5 11.2 168:01.45 firefox
> 20 0 238m 66m 18m R 2.7 0.4 12:54.50 plugin-containe
> 20 0 218m 52m 27m S 2.0 0.3 13:58.07 chromium-browse
> 20 0 517m 273m 213m S 1.7 1.8 164:34.82 Xorg
> 20 0 291m 51m 28m S 1.7 0.3 60:55.20 chromium-browse
> 20 0 32224 3636 2928 D 1.7 0.0 0:00.43 apt-get
> 20 0 947m 425m 18m S 1.3 2.7 84:25.01 java
> 20 0 266m 22m 13m S 1.0 0.1 15:40.20 mate-terminal
> 20 0 0 0 0 S 1.0 0.0 0:01.45 kworker/u8:1
> 20 0 0 0 0 S 1.0 0.0 0:00.46 kworker/u8:3
> 20 0 5388 1504 1064 S 0.7 0.0 7:14.54 top
> etc...
>
> (with PIDs and user edited out so it fits better!)
>
> The wa figure (IO-wait : time waiting for I/O completion) is noticeably
> high. But what's so special about reading these files?
Probably anything. It seems that at that point you are not using much swap
either, although running "vmstat 1" might give you a better idea (but I would
guess it isn't).
Is your partition aligned ? What layers are on the stack ? LVM ? RAID ?