Comment 14 for bug 574910

I'm running into the same issues on the Lucid 64bit EBS AMI, except with much higher load:

$ uptime
 18:06:22 up 18:31, 2 users, load average: 12.16, 13.54, 13.78

$ top -bn1 | head -20
top - 18:06:52 up 18:32, 2 users, load average: 11.53, 13.19, 13.65
Tasks: 108 total, 1 running, 107 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 4.4%us, 0.9%sy, 0.0%ni, 92.2%id, 0.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 2.4%st
Mem: 7864548k total, 3910252k used, 3954296k free, 194372k buffers
Swap: 0k total, 0k used, 0k free, 461708k cached

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    1 root 20 0 23704 1896 1268 S 0 0.0 0:00.15 init
    2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
    4 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
    6 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 events/0
    7 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 cpuset
    8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 khelper
    9 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 netns
   10 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 async/mgr
   11 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 xenwatch
   12 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 xenbus
   14 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/1

$ iostat -k
Linux 2.6.32-305-ec2 (ip-10-196-38-176) 07/09/2010 _x86_64_ (2 CPU)

avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
           4.35 0.00 0.94 0.16 2.36 92.20

Device: tps kB_read/s kB_wrtn/s kB_read kB_wrtn
sda1 3.10 3.79 15.36 252813 1025840
sdb 0.00 0.01 0.00 381 24

$ uptime
 18:07:45 up 18:33, 2 users, load average: 15.13, 13.87, 13.85

I have about 30 workers for misc programs running that are sitting idle, I'm moving over from a debian lenny box at a colo with nearly identical specs running slightly more workers with the same general setup, and the load is sitting at around 1 on that box.