AntonCL

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Hi

I have a server, which doesn't run as smoothely as I'd like to, it suffers from occasional crashes when under high load, and I'm trying to figure out where the error stems from.

During my investigations I discovered that ksoftirqd has a nice value of 268435451, which I believe is outside the acceptable range. (Dump from top can be found below)

Is there a problem with ksoftirqd? or some hardware? from my investigations, ksoftirqd shouldn't be visible in top, unless I have some hardware which is overdoing interrupts, but dmesg doesn't show anything.

In short, what should I do about the high nice value?, and can I use that to diagnose my system?

any help would be appreciated.
-----------------vvvvv top vvvvv ---------------

top - 16:57:31 up 58 min, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.53
Tasks: 117 total, 2 running, 115 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 767672k total, 682524k used, 85148k free, 83228k buffers
Swap: 2249060k total, 0k used, 2249060k free, 441232k cached
Change delay from 3.0 to:
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1 root 20 0 2636 1496 1096 S 0.0 0.2 0:00.96 init
2 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
4 root 15 268435451 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:18.19 ksoftirqd/0
5 root RT -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
6 root 15 -5 0 0 0 R 0.0 0.0 0:00.14 events/0
7 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
8 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
9 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
10 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 async/mgr
11 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kintegrityd/0
12 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.32 kblockd/0
13 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpid
14 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_notify
15 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kacpi_hotplug
16 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.59 ata/0
17 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux

tacorama

wow, that must be a glitch

what happens when you try to renice that process?