it's spelled out rather clearly in the man pages. It's how many processes used the CPU during the last 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes. My wicked old 500MHz P3 is sitting in the closet running a handful of stuff for the rest of the computers in the house. It routinely has a load average of between 1.5 and 2.5, with a handful of java apps that use about 65-70% CPU. That machine pretty much always has about 25% idle CPU, it's never really maxed out. Yet the load average sits between 1.5 and 2.5. There's still CPU left over for other things. The load average definitely does not tell you anything directly about active/idle CPU cycles. It only deals with *how many processes* are running and actively using CPU. Man pages clearly state this. Experience clearly shows this.
For some reason people seem to think that a 1.0 load average means your CPU is being used 100%, when this couldn't be more wrong. If that were true you could never have a load average greater than 1.0, now could you? With that line of thinking you would need to have a dual CPU system to ever see a load average of 2.0, and this is obviously not the case. Load average is only one factor that should govern your choice in whether or not your servers need upgrading. The actual amount of idle CPU time should be a bigger factor than load average. As should memory usage. Load average only tells you so much, it's still useful but it definitely is not the only thing you should look at. It is way down the list of what you should consider, actually. On 6/25/05, Ian mu <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not quite sure where you get that from (if I'm reading it right, > apologies if not). Load is previously stated is the amount of > processes on average that are waiting. > > For decent server performance (i.e gaming am referring to, webservers > for example you can get away with a lot more), I'd tend to try and > keep down to a load of 1, dual cpu's to a load of 2. I'd say you start > to get more noticable problems when you get to about double that, so > you can just about get away with a load of 2 on a single cpu system, 4 > on a dual, but wouldn't want to run a box at those loads. -- Clayton Macleod _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
