From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jul 9 1:30:37 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mta2-rme.xtra.co.nz (unknown [203.96.92.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CB26914DD6 for ; Fri, 9 Jul 1999 01:30:31 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from junkmale@pop3.xtra.co.nz) Received: from wocker ([210.55.152.102]) by mta2-rme.xtra.co.nz (InterMail v4.01.01.00 201-229-111) with SMTP id <19990709083321.GYOW112692.mta2-rme@wocker>; Fri, 9 Jul 1999 20:33:21 +1200 From: "Dan Langille" Organization: The FreeBSD Diary To: David Greenman Date: Fri, 9 Jul 1999 20:30:30 +1200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: Uptime basics!!! Reply-To: junkmale@xtra.co.nz Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG In-reply-to: <199907090241.TAA04489@implode.root.com> References: Your message of "Fri, 09 Jul 1999 11:50:04 +1000." <002201bec9ad$5d7d4ad0$4001a8c0@tasajohns.turnaround.com.au> X-mailer: Pegasus Mail for Win32 (v3.01d) Message-Id: <19990709083321.GYOW112692.mta2-rme@wocker> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 8 Jul 99, at 19:41, David Greenman wrote: > Uh, no, that is not what the load average means. The load average is a > composite number that includes both runnable processes and processes that > are blocked in a short term wait (usually disk I/O). This means that for > machines that are doing heavy disk I/O, the load average could be quite > high even when the CPU is 95% idle. On wcarchive, for example, the load > average typically runs around 40-50 with 50% CPU idle time. This may sound > high, but there are 38 disk drives on the machine, so although the drives > are fairly busy, the I/O is spread out over all of them - keeping the > interactive response time low and overall performance quite high. Where is this documented? I was trying to locate just this very information during the past week. Nothing in man uptime. If it belongs there, I volunteer to update it. How? -- Dan Langille - DVL Software Limited The FreeBSD Diary - http://www.FreeBSDDiary.org/freebsd/ NZ FreeBSD User Group - http://www.nzfug.nz.freebsd.org/ The Racing System - http://www.racingsystem.com/racingsystem.htm To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message