From owner-freebsd-questions  Thu Mar 12 05:01:41 1998
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To: Jamie Lawrence <jal@42is.com>
cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Load Averages: what exactly do they mean? 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 10 Mar 1998 15:22:57 PST."
             <3.0.3.32.19980310152257.00a5b3c0@colonel.42inc.com> 
From: David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Reply-To: dg@root.com
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 04:57:22 -0800
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>>From my reading of Design and Implementation of BSD4.4
>my understanding of the load average calculation is that
>it is the total of the number of processes ready to run or
>waiting on IO divided by the total number of processes.

   It's not a ratio. It is simply the average number of runnable processes
plus those in short term wait (usually disk IO).

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project

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