Ludicrous Load with sonarr/radarr/lidarr/bazarr dockers

I have been using the sonarr, radarr, bazarr, lidarr docker images along with jackett, deluge and sabnzb. It is all nicely integrated and runs well when it runs. I did have it running on my plex server but ended up moving it off to its own machine and mounting the media drives from the plex server via SMB. I moved it because of high load on the machine.

I am now running the setup on an old alienware laptop, i7, 8 cores, 16GB of ram, ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

All the containers are setup with the default recommended settings with the folders edited to suit.

The config directories are all on the shared hard drive which I believe is an older mechanical drive not an SSD. I guess this could be part of the problem.

When I dont run sonar, radarr, bazarr, lidarr I get a load average around about 1. Even when it is busy it only gets up to 2 or 3. So not even completely using all 8 cores.

When I start the other 4 up I have seen load averages over 100, but normally in the 30 range on the machine. Unsurprisingly this sometimes make the machine unresponsive.

I’m not sure what is going on and i’d like to get to the bottom of it. So please let me know what other information I can provide to help figure this out. Or is this normal?

After a reboot and 15 minutes everything but sonarr/radarr/lidarr/bazarr running load was about 1.

And 10 minutes after starting them up load was up to 23.

If this is normal so be it, but it seems ridiculously high and im concerned i’ve set it up wrong.

what are they doing during this high load time? sometimes they will utilize high cpu and high disk i/o but you’re not really giving us much to go on… if scheduled tasks are running and there is no cpu contention, they’ll hog it all until they finish or something with a lower nice priority comes long.

I’m not sure what I am doing. It could be scheduled tasks. The CPU’s are all busy but i’m guessing a lot of it is disk activity.

Sorry I can’t give you much to go on, if you can offer any pointers on what I should look at or what I can provide i’m happy to dig into it. All of the docker stuff is pretty new to me.

I’m not really sure where to start.

I would start by investigating the app logs and correlating your spikes to the logs, nothing really to do with docker here, just basic stuff.