{"id":137,"date":"2022-02-08T18:36:12","date_gmt":"2022-02-09T00:36:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/?p=137"},"modified":"2022-02-08T18:40:17","modified_gmt":"2022-02-09T00:40:17","slug":"howto-fix-artificially-high-load-average-on-freebsd-running-on-oracle-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/howto-fix-artificially-high-load-average-on-freebsd-running-on-oracle-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"HOWTO Fix Artificially High Load Average on FreeBSD Running on Oracle Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I noticed that my amd64 VPSes on Oracle Cloud all had load averages over 1.0. These are the free tier VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

# w\n6:11PM up 5 days, 1 hr, 2 users, load averages: 1.39, 1.62, 1.41<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This was with a basically idle machine. When I checked top <\/em>I found nothing interesting. No processes were running constantly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The machines in question are FreeBSD 13.0<\/p>\n\n\n\n
# freebsd-version -kru\n13.0-RELEASE-p7\n13.0-RELEASE-p7\n13.0-RELEASE-p7<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
I dug around in sysctl:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
kern.timecounter.choice: i8254(0) ACPI-fast(900) HPET(950) TSC(-100) dummy(-1000000)\nkern.timecounter.hardware: HPET<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
The timecounter clock source was HPET by default. I found that if I switched the clock source to  i8254 the load avergaes reverted to nominal levels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
# sysctl kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254\n\n# w\n6:32PM  up 5 days,  1:21, 2 users, load averages: 0.23, 0.27, 0.63\n<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
This was the solution to fixing the high load average on FreeBSD running on Oracle Cloud VPSes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In order to make this change permanent add it to your \/etc\/sysctl.conf file:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
# echo 'kern.timecounter.hardware=i8254' >> \/etc\/sysctl.conf<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Interestingly, the aarch64 (Ampere) FreeBSD 14\/current machine did not have this issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also tried the  ACPI-fast  timecounter source and it did not fix the issue. I was only able to fix the load average using the  i8254 timecounter clock source.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Thanks to koobs on #freebsd for helping me figure this out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I noticed that my amd64 VPSes on Oracle Cloud all had load averages over 1.0. These are the free tier VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro instances. # w 6:11PM up 5 days, 1 hr, 2 users, load averages: 1.39, 1.62, 1.41 This was with … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[3,4,79,130,129,24,112,102],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sourceopen.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}