Artificially high load average

[Andrew R. Gray]

In article <1352 at brchh104.bnr.ca> jon at netlabs.com (Jonathan Biggar) writes:

>On the fileserver, I have noticed that even when the entire network is
>idle, I often see the load average sit at a very constant level of 3 or 4.
>I have watched the ethernet and I don't see any traffic which could cause
>this, and top reports that only one process is in the running state at any
>time, and the system is running at 98-99% idle.

I have started noticing this on two Sun-3/280's, each with 3 diskless
clients after we upgraded them to 4.1. The frantic (untraceable) activity
continues for up to 30 minutes after they actually cease doing any real
work. Is this some form on garbage collection that's carried out when the
system isn't doing any real work ?