From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jul 9 1:38:25 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from implode.root.com (root.com [209.102.106.178]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 97F3D152BC for ; Fri, 9 Jul 1999 01:38:17 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from root@implode.root.com) Received: from implode.root.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by implode.root.com (8.8.8/8.8.5) with ESMTP id BAA08058; Fri, 9 Jul 1999 01:38:05 -0700 (PDT) Message-Id: <199907090838.BAA08058@implode.root.com> To: junkmale@xtra.co.nz Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Uptime basics!!! In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 09 Jul 1999 20:30:30 +1200." <19990709083321.GYOW112692.mta2-rme@wocker> From: David Greenman Reply-To: dg@root.com Date: Fri, 09 Jul 1999 01:38:05 -0700 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? It should be documented in the man page for 'uptime' and 'w', but I see that 'w' gets it wrong and 'uptime' doesn't say anything. -DG David Greenman Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message