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To: "David G. Lawrence" <dg@dglawrence.com>
From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Mon, 21 Feb 2005 13:08:34 PST."
             <20050221210834.GB87259@opteron.dglawrence.com> 
Date: Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:12:22 +0100
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cc: Christian Jachmann <Jachmann@unitix.org>
cc: Robert Watson <rwatson@freebsd.org>
cc: David Schultz <das@freebsd.org>
cc: current@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Load over 1000 
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In message <20050221210834.GB87259@opteron.dglawrence.com>, "David G. Lawrence"
 writes:
>> aren't being serviced isn't a bug.  The reason the load on systems with
>> many processes is typically low is that most processes are blocked on I/O
>> -- either waiting for it to complete, waing for a network packet, or
>> waiting for the user, so they're idle the rest of the time.  The CPU sits
>> there waiting for the world to catch up...
>
>   The load average has historically meant the number of processes either
>running/ready to run OR blocked by short term (disk I/O) wait. 

No, disk I/O sleeps is not involved.

The loadavg is the length of the runqueue.  Any process sleeping,
on network, disk or timer, is not counted towards the total.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.