On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 4:55 AM, Paul A. Franz, P.E. <p...@eucleides.com> wrote: > >From the manual pages for top: > > "...three load averages for the system. The load averages are the average > number of process ready to run during the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes." > > What does "ready to run" mean? > > Sometimes I will see '2.15, 2.04, 2.02' yet the highest %CPU is only 0.4% and > the > machine seems slow. How can I determine the actual bottleneck? Must not be > CPU usage. > Maybe it is disk speed? More typically the load averages are something like > '0.01, > 0.10, 0.31'. >
Paul - I think it means processes that are running or trying to run, but may or may not be making progress, due to waiting on disk/network IO, or other resources. Try looking at the output of 'iostat' (my fav - 'iostat -m -d 60 /dev/<devicename>') Most likely you are waiting on network or disk IO. Top also shows "IOWAIT" as a percentage of CPU utilization, if this is high you are waiting on data from disk or the network. Hope that helps, Nick -- Nick Webb Red Wire Services, LLC
