What would cause load to be incorrectly reported as being so high?

[BobMccapherey]

Screenshot of top as well as from admin interface attached.

There's only one VM running that isn't taking all the available memory so this makes little sense.

 

[SomeUser]

Load average is not what you think it is. It's a look at the run queue, and even if that task is blocked (reading from drive, waiting for input, whatever), it is still counted as part of the load. Look at vmstat, etc. Your CPU utilization is only 8.6%. No worries. Also, as a byproduct of using multiple CPUs, each CPU gets to run 1 task simultaneously. So, even if it's something minimal, if you have 12 processes executing at the same time, that's a load of.... 12.

Get it now?

 

[BobMccapherey]

Load average is not what you think it is. It's a look at the run queue, and even if that task is blocked (reading from drive, waiting for input, whatever), it is still counted as part of the load. Look at vmstat, etc. Your CPU utilization is only 8.6%. No worries. Also, as a byproduct of using multiple CPUs, each CPU gets to run 1 task simultaneously. So, even if it's something minimal, if you have 12 processes executing at the same time, that's a load of.... 12.

Get it now?

So slowly increasing past 300 load is normal, even though this is a 4 node cluster all running similar VMs and workloads and the nodes with more than 1 VM are showing less load average? To me this seems like a resource allocation leak.

 

[SomeUser]

It looks scary, but as long as things are working fine, I wouldn't worry about it. Load averages don't find/show resource leaks. Nothing to do with it.

https://mellowhost.com/blog/confusing-server-load-average-explained.html

 

[SomeUser]

Here. Try this and see what you get.

apt-get install htop
htop