Vinicius Vianna wrote:
Hi Daniel,
I was thinking about your question and at first I was sure that the man
page was right, the only thing is that you didn't think about how is the
better way to calculate the current load. If you think about it, when
you get a high load on your system the first sign of it will be in the 1
minute average, the others two averages will take some time to increase
showing this high load.
Except that like I said I was looking to see if I could use the 15
minutes average as it's a better average for heavier traffic on a web
page for example. Let say you publish something very popular, or it get
bookmark by reddit.com as an example, then I can tell you by experience
that the load will be much higher and will stay that way for 1 to 3 days
so in that case, the 15 minutes average way better for me oppose to
getting the 1 minute that might be just for something that happened to
concur with something else that might bring the load up. A regular day
might be a load of let say 2.6 or what ever. Then when a unexpected peak
comeup, it might be up to 12. I have cronjob that would best and in some
cases needs to be run multiple times a day, but in heavy load, I could
delay the process later. Before you asked why no always do it later.
Well, that job runs for 5 1/2 hours to 8 hours if the logs to process
gets to big. Also, there is an issue with PERL that will freeze my
system if I run it under heavy load for extended period of time making
it much better to be run more often and for less time.
And there is a point as well that if the logs get to big, I then need to
break it down manually and run it myself, witch really bugs me!
That's a little bit more of the history for my question and why.
Like I said, not the end of the world, but that would help my problem,
witch I work around it for now.
But later I thinked about it, when you say "current load", you mean the
instantaneous load (in a academic way), and that's not what cron is
looking here. I know it's the best we can get for current load but it's
really the 1 minute average load, so maybe it would be better to change
the manpage to something like "If the 1 minute average load is greater...".
Instantaneous load really wasn't in my mind and I really don't think it
would be of any use anyway. I can't think of a case now that I would
need it.
Best,
Daniel
