From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu May 2 18: 7: 8 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from tcpns.com (dsl-64-192-239-221.telocity.com [64.192.239.221]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 478D937B400; Thu, 2 May 2002 18:07:03 -0700 (PDT) Received: from localhost (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by tcpns.com (8.12.3/8.12.2) with ESMTP id g43172eP072831; Thu, 2 May 2002 21:07:02 -0400 (EDT) Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 21:07:02 -0400 (EDT) From: Jason Borkowsky To: John Baldwin Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: RE: CPU context switching/load numbers In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG > > Greetings! I have a FreeBSD-4.5 box that is a specialized server box. It > > doesn't run any user processes and only runs a bunch of small, server > > efficient processes. > > > > I have an inconsistency that I am trying to explain. When I do a "w" command > > on the box, I see this: > > > > 7:31PM up 74 days, 39 mins, 1 user, load averages: 1.12, 0.94, 0.93 > > > > This says I have a load of 1.12 over the past minute, or, for every > > available CPU interval, I have 1.12 processes requesting the CPU. > > This last bit is where you go wrong. The 1.12 is just for the minute prior to > when you ran the command, it has no relation to any previous minutes. Just > cause it is 1.12 right now doesn't mean the average load for every minute is > 1.12. But these numbers are over months...I have used an expect script to periodically poll the load and vmstat, and save them off to a file. My average load over a three month period is about 0.98, but the average CPU idle time over the same 3 month period is about 85% idle. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message