loadavg always equal or above 1.00 - how to explain?

Tomasz Chmielewski
2005-12-01T11:57:23Z

I noticed one of my Samba + OpenLDAP servers, running 2.6.11.4 kernel
has loadavg always equal or above 1.00, although I can't explain it.

# cat /proc/loadavg
1.00 1.10 1.06 1/65 782

This server is barely used, and as I remember, loadavg was always close
to 0.00 on that system.

When I view the process list with top, no process takes more than 1% of
CPU time; RAM usage is also minimal:

# free
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 320836 241016 79820 0 23308 177232
-/+ buffers/cache: 40476 280360
Swap: 811272 14612 796660

This has ~ 50 processes running (ps aux|wc -l), and ~ 50 network
connections (netstat -tupna|wc -l), so everything normal.

Nothing unusual in dmesg, too.

What can cause this anormal load, and how can I spot it?

--
Tomek
http://wpkg.org
WPKG - software deployment and upgrades with Samba