From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Mar 6 20:14:15 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from wondermutt.net (host75-157.student.udel.edu [128.175.75.157]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B147C37BC69 for ; Mon, 6 Mar 2000 20:14:04 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from papalia@udel.edu) Received: from morgaine (morgaine.wondermutt.net [192.168.1.2]) by wondermutt.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id XAA00456; Mon, 6 Mar 2000 23:12:38 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from papalia@udel.edu) Message-Id: <4.1.20000306230938.009621f0@mail.udel.edu> X-Sender: papalia@mail.udel.edu X-Mailer: QUALCOMM Windows Eudora Pro Version 4.1 Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2000 23:10:22 -0500 To: Erik Trulsson , freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG From: John Subject: Re: Uptime/Load Averages In-Reply-To: <20000304195940.A337@student.csd.uu.se> References: <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu> <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >> In an ever-present quest to learn and understand, I was trying to learn >> more about "load averages" as shown in uptime. I read a quite extensive >> discussion in the archives over how the load average is *calculated*, but >> not exactly what it's saying. I guess I'm wondering: is it an absolute >> scale? Is the min 0 and the max 100 or some other number? Is a load avg of >> 0.1 good while a load avg of 1.0 is bad? Or is it not that cut and dry? >> What does knowing the load avg actually *tell* me. > >The "load" is the number of processes that want to run at any given time. >Thus a load average of 0.0 means that no processes wanted to run while a >load average of 3.2 means that on average 3.2 processes wanted to run. >Thus the minimum is 0 and there is no max. >Anything below 1.0 is good. (Since that means that all processes got all the >CPU-time they wanted.) >A load above, say, 3.0 over a long time means that you probably need a >faster machine. >(If you have multiple CPUs you can multiply all the numbers above with the >number of CPUs.) Yup. makes sense. Between the answers received, and by toying around with executing extra processes (buildworld, seti, etc), it makes more sense. Thanks!!! --John To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message