One source of high load average spikes that I've seen in my job is when a process crashes and generates a core dump. While the core dump is being written, all t

One source of high load average spikes that I've seen in my job is when a process crashes and generates a core dump. While the core dump is being written, all threads in the process are in the TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE state even though they are doing absolutely nothing, and as such they all count towards the load average as if they were spinning on on a CPU core. If the total virtual memory of the process is large, say in the multi-GB range, coredumping can take on the order of a minute, and Linux will report an unreasonably high load average if that process had a lot of running threads. Things like the above scenario make me treat the load average metric with a lot of skepticism. I would much rather use other metrics to infer load.