From owner-freebsd-questions Sat Mar 4 11: 0: 2 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from merganser.its.uu.se (merganser.its.uu.se [130.238.6.236]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E9F5A37B7CD for ; Sat, 4 Mar 2000 10:59:58 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from ertr1013@student.csd.uu.se) Received: from regulus.its.uu.se ([130.238.7.19]:63242 "HELO ertr1013.student.csd.uu.se") by merganser.its.uu.se with SMTP id ; Sat, 4 Mar 2000 19:59:13 +0100 Received: (qmail 354 invoked by uid 1001); 4 Mar 2000 18:59:41 -0000 Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 19:59:41 +0100 From: Erik Trulsson To: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Uptime/Load Averages Message-ID: <20000304195940.A337@student.csd.uu.se> References: <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu>; from papalia@udel.edu on Sat, Mar 04, 2000 at 12:10:39PM -0500 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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