I happen to notice a quite high CPU load average on my Core2 quad core. The load average was about 0.5 or even up to 0.8 when running the KDE4 desktop. Funny enough my old Pentium4 the load average with KDE 3.5 (lenny) is near to 0.0. Both hosts are used a “home server” and gateway running some processes like Squid and Apache. “Ok”, I thought, “when I stop KDE, load average will be back to normal”. So I stopped kdm. But the quad core still has an higher CPU load average than the Pentium4:
On the Quad Core:
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top – 21:57:38 up 8 days, 3:09, 16 users, load average: 0.20, 0.16, 0.11
Tasks: 292 total, 1 running, 290 sleeping, 1 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.6%id, 0.0%wa, 0.2%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 8198096k total, 1083416k used, 7114680k free, 80k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 225956k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2530 nobody 40 0 31788 4544 1780 S 0 0.1 16:58.64 openvpn
4745 ij 40 0 27116 3584 832 S 0 0.0 0:13.98 screen
1 root 40 0 10328 684 572 S 0 0.0 0:01.97 init
2 root 40 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:01.40 migration/0
4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:10.48 ksoftirqd/0
[/code]
On the Pentium4:
[code]
top – 21:48:48 up 1 day, 9:20, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 189 total, 1 running, 188 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.2%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3115968k total, 2622904k used, 493064k free, 104k buffers
Swap: 1951800k total, 824k used, 1950976k free, 1964064k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
12349 lp 20 0 3264 608 440 S 1 0.0 11:43.34 lpd
16009 ij 20 0 27376 8380 6288 S 1 0.3 2:50.59 gkrellm
19366 root 20 0 2392 1204 884 R 1 0.0 0:44.70 top
1 root 20 0 1984 692 596 S 0 0.0 0:02.56 init
[/code]
I would have expected the opposite: a higher CPU usage on the Pentium4 and a lower one on the Quad Core2… The Quad is a Q9550S and supposed to be more power efficient than the Pentium4, but I doubt that the Q9550S can save more energy with an higher CPU load. The reason for the high CPU load is still mysterious…