For about the last 6 months, and for about a year before that (with a 6 month hiatus), one of my servers has had a consistently high load average:
13:37:34 up 192 days, 5:44, 2 users, load average: 2.00, 2.01, 2.00
Per another answer, I checked the output of ps:
$ ps -eo stat,pid,user,command | egrep "^STAT|^D|^R"
STAT PID USER COMMAND
D< 3043 root /sbin/modprobe -Q pci:v00008086d0000293Esv000015D9sd0000D780bc04sc03i00
D< 3150 root /sbin/modprobe -Qba pnp:dPNP0401
Checking the config & loaded modules:
$ modprobe -c | grep "pnp:dPNP0401"
alias pnp:dPNP0401* parport_pc
$ sudo modprobe -l | grep parport_pc
/lib/modules/2.6.24-29-server/kernel/drivers/parport/parport_pc.ko
So it appears to be a parallel port rule, but I can't think of what might be connected, or why. Physical access to the server is about 2 hours drive away.
Operating system is Ubuntu 8.04.4.
I can't see anything obvious anywhere in /etc/ but I may not know what I'm looking for.
Any clues as to what might be causing this, and where this modprobe rule may have come from?