Date: Mon, 06 Mar 2000 23:10:22 -0500 From: John <papalia@udel.edu> To: Erik Trulsson <ertr1013@student.csd.uu.se>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Uptime/Load Averages Message-ID: <4.1.20000306230938.009621f0@mail.udel.edu> In-Reply-To: <20000304195940.A337@student.csd.uu.se> References: <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu> <4.1.20000304120821.0094f990@mail.udel.edu>
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>> 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
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