Date: Sat, 12 May 2001 22:02:31 -0600 (MDT) From: Doug Russell <drussell@saturn-tech.com> To: Nuno Teixeira <nuno.teixeira@pt-quorum.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: load averages - the meaning Message-ID: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0105122145420.17454-100000@beastie.saturn-tech.com> In-Reply-To: <20010512230357.Y1738-100000@gateway.bogus>
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On Sat, 12 May 2001, Nuno Teixeira wrote: > I don't know if this is the right list to make my question. If it doesn't > please forgive me. freebsd-questions is the proper list for general questions. Please use that list in the future. Please note that I've moved this reply to there in an effort to cut down the noise on -stable. > Well, the question is related to "load averages" that we see in "w", "top" > and other system utilities. I have look at this programs man pages but I > don't find the really meaning of it. In the first paragraph the w manpage, it says: The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run queue averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes. Simply put, this is the average number of processes waiting to run something at a given time. It doesn't tell you a whole lot about the real load of the system if you only look at the load average. > In this momment I am doing a "make -j4 buildworld" in a X11 envirement > (XFree86 / IceWM) on my Cyrix 200 and the load averages are about 4.88. Because you are telling make to start 4 simultaneough processes for your compile, it makes sense that your one processor would usually have about 4 jobs in the run queue at most times duting the compile. If you go into /usr/ports, and to 'make -j32 readmes', you will get about 32 load average while 32 processes are building a readme file, etc. > What the limits of load averages and what the danger values and in what > that this values are based. The reasonable maximum will depend on what these processes are actually doing. The aforementioned readme build, or background mp3 encoding, etc. will work very nicely. 32 simultaneous huge high-priority processes might not be so kind. BSD should still handle the load gracefully, though. :) Later...... <Doug> To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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