On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 03:54:15PM +0930, Edwards, David (JTS) wrote:
| uptime:
| 3:48PM up 15 days, 19:59, 2 users, load averages: 1.15, 1.17, 1.16
|
| These seem like high average loads to me but the server is idling (as
| shown by CPU usage in top).
|
| I understood that load averages were related to the number of processes
| in the run-queue (i.e. waiting to get some processor time) so average
| loads above 1 would show a processing bottleneck.
|
| Did I get this wrong? If so, what do the load averages show and what
| would be a high load for a dual CPU (4 core) system?
Load average is a pretty much useless beast in and of itself. Looking
at the number by itself generally doesn't say anything. Graph the load
over time to see how your system behaves in day to day work, then you
can relate current load average to previous load averages and draw
some very vague conclusions ("the system is busier than usual around
this time of day, this might indicate badness somewhere" and stuff
like that).
More usefull information is found in top(1), systat(1) and netstat(1).
These give many more numbers for different parts of the system. Still,
having some history on what those numbers usually look like is
valuable in determining the current "load" of the system.
Cheers,
Paul 'WEiRD' de Weerd
--
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