Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 19:59:41 +0100 From: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.csd.uu.se> To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Uptime/Load Averages Message-ID: <20000304195940.A337@student.csd.uu.se> In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu>; from papalia@udel.edu on Sat, Mar 04, 2000 at 12:10:39PM -0500 References: <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu>
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On Sat, Mar 04, 2000 at 12:10:39PM -0500, John wrote: > Hi all - > > In an ever-present quest to learn and understand, I was trying to learn > more about "load averages" as shown in uptime. I read a quite extensive > discussion in the archives over how the load average is *calculated*, but > not exactly what it's saying. I guess I'm wondering: is it an absolute > scale? Is the min 0 and the max 100 or some other number? Is a load avg of > 0.1 good while a load avg of 1.0 is bad? Or is it not that cut and dry? > What does knowing the load avg actually *tell* me. The "load" is the number of processes that want to run at any given time. Thus a load average of 0.0 means that no processes wanted to run while a load average of 3.2 means that on average 3.2 processes wanted to run. Thus the minimum is 0 and there is no max. Anything below 1.0 is good. (Since that means that all processes got all the CPU-time they wanted.) A load above, say, 3.0 over a long time means that you probably need a faster machine. (If you have multiple CPUs you can multiply all the numbers above with the number of CPUs.) To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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