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cc: Brian Somers <brian@awfulhak.org>, freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: load averages never decrease to 0 (FreeBSD 2.1.6) 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 31 Dec 1997 12:02:38 PST."
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Date: Thu, 01 Jan 1998 13:54:35 +0000
From: Brian Somers <brian@awfulhak.org>
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> >[.....]
> >> I have my laptop running 60 ppp processes - all idle - for the last 
> >> couple of days.  The load average tapers out at exactly 1.0.  It's a 
> >> P120 w/ 40Mb of memory running 2.2-stable from about 3 days ago.
> >[.....]
> >
> >I take that back.  It's now running at exactly 5.0 !  Nothing else 
> >(except the 60 ppps) is running ?????????
> 
>    The code that calculates the load average is very simple and can be found
> in /sys/vm/vm_meter.c. You should be able to take the output of 'ps' and
> determine why it is that the code is getting it wrong.

It's not really that simple, is it ?  For example, updatepri() in 
kern_synch.c adjusts p_slptime based on the load average....

All of the ppp processes are ``Ss'' (sleeping session leaders), 
and always blocked in `select' according to ps -l.

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

-- 
Brian <brian@Awfulhak.org>, <brian@FreeBSD.org>, <brian@OpenBSD.org>
      <http://www.Awfulhak.org>
Don't _EVER_ lose your sense of humour....