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Date:      Wed, 14 Nov 2001 22:51:31 -0500 (EST)
From:      Chris BeHanna <behanna@zbzoom.net>
To:        FreeBSD-Stable <stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: Weird load averages
Message-ID:  <20011114224822.G57801-100000@topperwein.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <20011114073152.A59943@mikea.ath.cx>

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On Wed, 14 Nov 2001, mikea wrote:

> 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.

    Actually, it says how many processes are in the run queue, on
average, over the past <foo> minutes.

    If there's some process out there that's in a tight loop that
contains a short sleep, or that performs some blocking operation over
and over, that returns in fairly short order, that would account for
the load average.

-- 
Chris BeHanna
Software Engineer                   (Remove "bogus" before responding.)
behanna@bogus.zbzoom.net
I was raised by a pack of wild corn dogs.


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