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Date:      Wed, 14 Nov 2001 07:31:52 -0600
From:      mikea <mikea@mikea.ath.cx>
To:        stable@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Weird load averages
Message-ID:  <20011114073152.A59943@mikea.ath.cx>
In-Reply-To: <004101c16cd7$b714b2c0$0200000a@peter>; from peter@no-nonsense.org on Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 07:43:48AM %2B0100
References:  <004101c16cd7$b714b2c0$0200000a@peter>

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On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 07:43:48AM +0100, Peter C. Verhage wrote:
> last pid: 72033;  load averages:  1.01,  1.02,  0.94 up 18+11:55:05
> 07:38:59
> 38 processes:  1 running, 37 sleeping
> CPU states:  0.0% user,  0.0% nice,  0.0% system,  1.2% interrupt, 98.8%
> idle
> Mem: 107M Active, 76M Inact, 33M Wired, 12M Cache, 35M Buf, 20M Free
> Swap: 512M Total, 156K Used, 512M Free
> 
> Check the load averages. They have been like that for over 5 minutes now
> (I've been looking at it for 5 minutes now, so maybe even longer...). And
> they don't change! If I look at the CPU states and if I look at the CPU time
> of every process it's almost 0.00 for each process. So I don't understand
> why the load averages don't decrease... :/

The load average, IIRC, is unrelated to the CPU consumption of
the running processes, and instead gives an idea of how many
processes have been running over the past <foo> minutes.

Note that you have 1 running and 37 sleeping processes in your
"top" output. That would give you a load average of 1.0 over
time. If, in addition, cron-driven processes woke up, or you ran
something for a little bit, or some other process(es) woke up
for a short time, that would account handily for the first two
numbers in the load average vector.

I account for the third by postulating that you had zero
processes running for a while.

-- 
Mike Andrews
mikea@mikea.ath.cx
Tired old sysadmin since 1964

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