Hi Monte, On Thursday, December 13, 2001, 1:00:00 AM, you brought forth from the deepest reaches of your consciousness:
MM> A question that has been naggin at me for a while, is what is considered MM> excessive load on a box? MM> I have several Linux boxes running at home, most running 24/7. It is one MM> of my main hobbies, and I am really the only user on the machines for the MM> most part. Eventually I want to get things set up so everything is more MM> tied together, but right now, each box is pretty much independent, i.e. MM> couldn't care less if any one box croaked, other than the firewall/gateway MM> box, of course ;) MM> I have one box which is a no-name white-box Celeron 266 w/ 64MB RAM. MM> Running XFCE, Opera, Pine, Slrn, Gimp, and dnetc, it usually averages MM> btwn 1.5 and 2.5 on the load average numbers, but doesn't seem to have too MM> many problems that can't be otherwise attributed to a *slow* hard drive. MM> I am running dnetc, so it appears that I am almost always running at MM> *least* 1.0, usually more, no matter which box it is. MM> What I want to know, is at what point is a box considered 'overloaded' and MM> something needs to be done about it? How high of a sustained load average MM> is healthy? Here's my best shot at explaining this. Hope it is clear. Those numbers you see in top/w/uptime are the average number of processes in the run queue for the last 1, 5, 15 minutes respectively. The higher the numbers the higher the load. The problem with this is that the load averages are dependant upon the system. So there isn't a clear way to say what is too much. You need to know your system well enough to know if you are reaching it's capacity. A powerful (MIPS/RISC/whatever) system might still have plenty of juice left with load averages of 50 or more. A P-100 would likely start dying (becoming unresponsive) at around 5-6. So a load of 1 on one system is not the same as a load of 1 on another (unless they are identical). If you can push your system to it's limit, and monitor top while doing so, note the point at which the system becomes unresponsive (or extremely poor) and you will know where you stand at all other times. Have fun, -- _________________________________________________________________ Brian Ashe CTO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Dee-Web Software Services, LLC. http://www.dee-web.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------- You don't have to swim faster than the shark... You just have to swim faster than the people you're with. _______________________________________________ Redhat-list mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/redhat-list
