On Wed, 8 Oct 2003, Sudev Barar wrote:
> What does the load average in TOP mean? One of our user is trying to run
> a HUGE spreadsheet in open office. Running TOP I see that up to 97% of
> the CPU usage gets allotted and the CPU "Load Average" is showing
> averages of 1, 5 & 15 minutes ranging between 3.8 ~ 1.2
> I want to know what this figure mean? Is this indicating that the
> processor is getting loaded beyond the capacity (and hence slow down??)
>
Its the average number of processes wanting to use a processor in
the last x minutes. I think. So a load average of 1 could mean that 1
processes has been using the processor solidly for the last 1 minute or
it could mean that 6 processors have each done 10 seconds processing for
the last minute.
The numbers end up being exponential. I've seen machines with
loads of users running happily with a load of 10 for hours. Then I've
seen machines with a load of 0.5 seaming sluggish. This is because 1
process doing a lot of work will produce a lower load than 10 processes
doing a bit of work.
Also processes waiting for disk are counted but not idle ones
hence if your io is the bottle neck load will go up and up while your
processor is actually doing nothing (or practically nothing)
Any load over 50 is bad and probably means you need more
processors but is not unlikly if you have 50 people all tring to compile
at once on the same computer.
In short the number are complely meaningless. Except when compared
to the same computer. In top if you hit i to hide idle processess the load
is the average number of items in that list.
Peter Childs
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