On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 12:27, Andrew DeFaria wrote: > On 12/30/2010 06:05 PM, David Antliff wrote: >> On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 08:23, Andrew DeFaria wrote: >>> >>> Well that sucks. Surely Windows has some means of reporting how busy the >>> system is. uptime should use that. >> >> But then they wouldn't be actual load averages where most >> people/programs expected to see load averages. >> >> -- David > > Understood, but current real load averages be calculated? Besides wouldn't > those people who expect to see real load averages (i.e. me!) be disappointed > to only see 0's?!? IOW wouldn't even fake load averages be better than just > always 0?!?
The "load average" is a bit more complicated than just how busy the system is - it's related to the number of processes waiting for the CPU, with some time-weighted averaging and a few other herbs and spices. I'm no Windows system programmer so I don't even know if that sort of information is even available to Cygwin. I 'discovered' this zero thing myself last year when I was trying to incorporate some sort of logging into a build system I wrote to run in Cygwin - I had hoped to compare 'machine load' over multiple builds over time, but as you know, you just get zeroes. So I just used build timing metrics instead (i.e. the 'time' command). Personally I wouldn't mind a Cygwin/Windows-specific measurement that provided some sort of "how busy is the machine" metric (one probably exists - anyone?) but I think it might be better to not overload the "load average" fields as they are pretty specific in their meaning. In my opinion, I think it's better to have zero values rather than anything fake. A consistent and reasonable 'estimate' (if possible) would be OK for my purposes but I can't speak for anyone else. -- David. -- Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
