I am stuck with this one.
Clean install Ubuntu 12.04 server 64bit on two physical machines. Machines are identical except one has 8GB RAM and the problem machine has 32GB RAM, both machines were purchased with identical specifications at the same time. Ubuntu fully updated as of 24 hours ago.
I am using virt-manager through X-windows over SSH tunnel to manage the virtual machines, the server OS doesn't run X-windows sessions at all, my desktop does.
Built and ran multiple Ubuntu 12.04 server 64bit virtual machines, each with 1GB RAM allocated. The VMs are all basically configured the same (forgiving MAC addresses, etc).
The 8GB machine has 2xVMs and the 32GB machine has 3x VMs. All virtual machines are reporting low load (less than 0.5, normally 0.01) and are not highly utilised at all.
8GB host server is reporting load of less than 0.1, normally 0.01. 32GB host server is reporting load of greater than 10.0 sustained. Again, all VMs are reporting internal load of less than 0.5. CPU in top is 95%+ idle, 0.0% wait.
Ideas on why 32GB machine has high load (while host idle and guests idle) while identically configured 8GB machine is reporting the expected low load?
Load on 32GB goes high with one VM started, running 3xVMs doesn't make load go higher. Stopping all virtual machines causes 32GB machine load to drop.
I cannot figure this out. I expect the 32GB load to match the 8GB load.
UPDATE #1: Nathan C
top - 16:19:54 up 8 days, 6:01, 1 user, load average: 14.33, 18.23, 18.07
Tasks: 135 total, 1 running, 134 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.5%us, 0.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 98.9%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 32938864k total, 29307380k used, 3631484k free, 331324k buffers
Swap: 4182436k total, 0k used, 4182436k free, 25330400k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
8752 libvirt- 20 0 3170m 747m 6932 S 7 2.3 26:27.20 /usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-1.0 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 -name r -uuid ...
8720 libvirt- 20 0 3969m 928m 6936 S 3 2.9 76:17.66 /usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-1.0 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 -name m -uuid ...
8687 libvirt- 20 0 3315m 1.0g 6936 S 2 3.3 60:33.03 /usr/bin/kvm -S -M pc-1.0 -enable-kvm -m 1024 -smp 1,sockets=1,cores=1,threads=1 -name d -uuid ...