What is happening with high load average but mostly "wa"-wait?
Among several other annoyances since upgrading from F24 to F25, it is way too easy to get the system to stop responding.
The disk light is on solidly with only a wink (10 ms?) off every few seconds. I can't log in remotely (times out trying to connect) nor switch to an alternate console for diagnosis, but this time (after dozens of tries over the last 1.5 months) I finally got top
to show this. Note the load average is climbing with one process running (presumably top
) and 92% to 99% "waiting" (disk i/o wait?) cpu time shown each update for the duration.
top - 21:51:00 up 3 days, 6:28, 1 user, load average: 6.62, 5.43, 2.84
Tasks: 200 total, 1 running, 198 sleeping, 0 stopped, 1 zombie
%Cpu0 : 0.3 us, 0.0 sy, 0.0 ni, 0.0 id, 99.3 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.3 si, 0.0 st
%Cpu1 : 1.3 us, 0.3 sy, 0.0 ni, 9.0 id, 89.4 wa, 0.0 hi, 0.0 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem : 4037464 total, 230700 free, 3256972 used, 549792 buff/cache
KiB Swap: 4063228 total, 3690424 free, 372804 used. 219536 avail Mem
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1588 wally 20 0 2235276 287484 32592 S 1.0 7.1 114:30.20 gnome-shell
327 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.3 0.0 0:08.46 kworker/0:+
899 boinc 30 10 350816 2328 1656 S 0.3 0.1 2:59.09 boinc_clie+
16370 wally 20 0 4234612 2.212g 41828 D 0.3 57.4 261:08.08 firefox
27838 wally 20 0 155796 4084 3620 R 0.3 0.1 0:00.07 top
1 root 20 0 215140 3524 1056 S 0.0 0.1 0:06.12 systemd
2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.13 kthreadd
3 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.23 ksoftirqd/0
5 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kworker/0:+
7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:45.58 rcu_sched
8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcu_bh
9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:15.13 rcuos/0
10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 rcuob/0
I got the system to recover by closing Firefox which had been rendering two tabs which appeared blank, one containing this and the other this. After closing and waiting for the disk light to go off—taking 30-40 seconds—top
shows
top - 21:58:00 up 3 days, 6:35, 1 user, load average: 0.49, 2.56, 2.53
Tasks: 191 total, 1 running, 190 ...
Try out
iotop
andsmartctl
if you suspect disk problems.Do remember having issue like that, removing the .mozilla folder in my home make firefox work fine, but you also have the same issue with google-chrome so not sure but you can give it a try.