Question
Droplet experiencing high load averages during low CPU usage
I have a Ubuntu 18.04 droplet that occasionally experiences high load averages for brief periods, but the DO monitoring charts show low and steady CPU usage, steady disk I/O, steady traffic, and a small bump in RAM (probably due to extra apache processes waiting to run). So, everything looks normal except for the load averages. If the load averages go up into the 20s then I can see significant impact on page load times.
These episodes are not associated with high traffic, and they don’t normally last for more than a few minutes so it’s hard for me to catch them as they’re occurring. However, the one time I managed to do so I used the “top” command and saw extra apache processes (as expected during high load), but nothing else looked unusual. Nothing suspicious appears in syslog.
Any recommendations on what I need to do to troubleshoot this problem?
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