From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Nov 10 16:29:53 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 17E1437B401 for ; Sun, 10 Nov 2002 16:29:52 -0800 (PST) Received: from wantadilla.lemis.com (wantadilla.lemis.com [192.109.197.80]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9641A43E42 for ; Sun, 10 Nov 2002 16:29:50 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from grog@lemis.com) Received: by wantadilla.lemis.com (Postfix, from userid 1004) id AF41E518E8; Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:59:47 +1030 (CST) Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2002 10:59:47 +1030 From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey To: Brian Astill Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Load averages exceed 1 - but all seems well! Message-ID: <20021111002947.GC75150@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <200211102330.44828.bastill@sa.apana.org.au> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <200211102330.44828.bastill@sa.apana.org.au> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Organization: The FreeBSD Project Phone: +61-8-8388-8286 Fax: +61-8-8388-8725 Mobile: +61-418-838-708 WWW-Home-Page: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ X-PGP-Fingerprint: 9A1B 8202 BCCE B846 F92F 09AC 22E6 F290 507A 4223 Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Sunday, 10 November 2002 at 23:30:44 +1030, Brian Astill wrote: > Running "fvcool -e -i" works just fine for me in keeping my Athlon CPU cool, > BUT the output from TOP, shows: > > last pid: 2890; load averages: 1.10, 1.07, 1.00 > up 1+02:45:27 23:20:20 > 66 processes: 2 running, 64 sleeping > CPU states: 1.2% user, 98.4% nice, 0.4% system, 0.0% interrupt, 0.0% idle > Mem: 112M Active, 139M Inact, 39M Wired, 11M Cache, 41M Buf, 11M Free > Swap: 650M Total, 650M Free > > PID USERNAME PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU CPU COMMAND > 2814 root 97 20 872K 368K RUN 36:32 98.00% 98.00% fvcool > > Yet I can still run all the apps I wish, including X/Windowmaker, without any > apparent loss of speed or stability. How is this possible? The load average is just an indication of the average number of processes waiting to use the machine at any one time. It can get very high, over 100 under some circumstances. The reason you can run your other applications is because of load balancing. fvcool is running at a low priority (higher number). I still suspect it's not supposed to consume all that CPU time, though, and I find it rather strange that this should help cool the CPU. Greg -- When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients. If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original recipients. For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html See complete headers for address and phone numbers To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message