Stopped Jobs inflating the load average on 4.2 BSD

[Arnold D. Robbins {EUCC}]

I am the (relatively new) sys admin for two vax 780's running 4.2 BSD. Our
version has had almost none of the bugs or problems fixed that have been
posted to the net.

We seem to have a problem whereby, when there are a large number of stopped
jobs on the system (~20-40% of the total number of processes), the load average
goes way up, and response time goes way down. Yet, to my understanding (which
is probably very limited), they should not contribute to the load.

I had conjectured that maybe the system was slowing down because Unix is doing
a linear search of the process table every time it schedules another job to
run. Yet, supposedly, these jobs should be like jobs waiting on i/o, and not
even eligible for scheduling.

Any enlightenment, in clear terms, would be appreciated, preferably by mail,
since I am behind on my netnews reading.  If this has been discussed before,
I missed it, or skipped it, since I did not used to be quite so interested in
these kinds of things, and I apologize. In that case, a summary would be
appreciated.

(I realize that having such a large number of stopped jobs is not a Good Thing,
but it can be very hard to properly educate the users about how to correctly
use job control. I am asking about this to find out how the system actually
works, and what, if anything should be done about it, besides killing the jobs
off and teaching the users what to do next time.)

Thanks in Advance,
-- 
Arnold Robbins
CSNET:	arnold at emory	BITNET:	arnold at emoryu1
ARPA:	arnold%emory.csnet at csnet-relay.arpa
UUCP:	{ akgua, decvax, gatech, sb1, sb6, sunatl }!emory!arnold

"All this digital stuff is just a fad. Analog is the way to go."
	-- William M. Robbins, 1984