Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 07:09:52 +0100 From: "Rob MacGregor" <freebsd.macgregor@blueyonder.co.uk> To: <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: load > 1, no process using >10% CPU...? Message-ID: <200504200609.j3K69qif018852@the-macgregors.org> In-Reply-To: <20050420011930.GF770@afflictions.org>
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On Wednesday, April 20, 2005 2:20 AM, Damian Gerow <> unleashed the infinite monkeys and produced: > Until the build failed. Now top /still/ isn't showing me much. systat -vm > is showing me at just under 100% User, with little to no disk activity. > > I'm a little fuzzy as to /how/ load is calculated, but why would my system > think that it's doing all kinds of work when ps, top, and systat can't > really tell me /what/ it's doing? The "load" is the number of active processes (the number of processes in the run queue). That's all it measures - not CPU load, disk I/O or anything else - purely the number of processes in the run queue. Load and processor usage aren't linked. If the processes are I/O bound (for example) then while the system load may be high, the actual CPU usage may well be low. Google produced http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/ldavg1.shtml, which isn't a bad description of the load average, though heavily based on Linux. -- Rob | Oh my God! They killed init! You bastards!
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