Drew's questions

While trying to attach a series of volumes to a set of devices, I have run into the following issue:

Some of the devices get stuck in an "infinite" state of attachment. (I do not already have volumes attached to those devices that "fail" nor are the volumes to be attached, already attached to another device)

• /dev/sde1 - EBS volume will not attach
• /dev/sde2 - OK
• /dev/sde3 - EBS volume will not attach
• /dev/sde4 - OK
• /dev/sde5 - OK
• /dev/sde6 - OK

According to the AWS documentation, these are well within the range of acceptable device mount points.

Here is some additional information about the state of the attachment.

When requesting information about the volume via the API:

ec2-describe-volumes vol-xxxxxxxx

This is the result:

ATTACHMENT  vol-xxxxxxxx    i-90909090  /dev/sde3   attaching   2013-05-06T21:15:56+0000    false

When creating a Provisioned IOPS EBS volume (or any EBS volumes for that matter) from a snapshot, are the "First Use Penalty” effects avoided?

Are they only partially avoided (for the blocks that are written) from the snapshot, or are they completely avoided?

If the former, is there a way to pre-warm only the blocks that are not written from the snapshot?

On an EC2 m1.large, with an AVG CPU Utilization graph such as this:

how is is possible that the load average is greater than the number of EC2 Compute Units (4) ?

cat /proc/loadavg
5.78 5.57 5.44 1/188 9388