Load average of 300+ . . . . what the . . . ?
12:10PM up 7 days, 23:33, 3 users, load averages: 317.38, 314.25, 309.87
Perhaps I need to look at those monitoring scripts I just set up . . .
What a maroon. I don’t know exactly what went wrong: all I ended up doing was compounding an earlier mistake. I didn’t specify the path to the iostat command. It worked manually but not on cron, and I didn’t realize why. So I set up a test to verify that the data file that iostat was creating really existed. Again, it did on the command line but not on cron (why the shell script didn’t bark out an error when cron ran it is a mystery). So the script ran every 5 minutes, waiting in vain for the file to be populated. Lather, rinse, repeat . . . .
So when I figured out that rookie error, all seems to be working again. Now to test it — again — and see if the logging and plotting works.