[ale] usb drives suck

Ed Cashin ecashin at noserose.net
Mon Jan 25 14:11:30 EST 2010


The iowait bucket is a subset of the old "idle" bucket.  It just
means the CPU doesn't have much to do and you're doing I/O.

Specifically, when the last thing that happened before the CPU
went idle was to kick off some I/O, the tick gets counted in the
iowait bucket.

So there should be plenty of CPU for other processes while
the system waits for the I/O to finish.  I don't know why the
load average (running average count of processes that would
like to run but have to wait) would go up unless there were lots
of processes that couldn't run until the I/O finished.

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>
  http://noserose.net/e/
  http://www.coraid.com/


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