On Wed, May 03, 2006 at 03:30:35PM -0400, Will H. Backman wrote: > I'm looking for some hints on evaluating load average. I have a new > system that is showing load averages over .50 most of the time, but I > don't see that it is doing much according to systat vmstat. I figured > that this machine would be way overpowered for the job it is doing. > Is load average (like what is displayed in uptime) really a good > indicator? > What tips do people have for profiling?
Load average is very useful as long as you realize what it means. Another good thing is the cpu states (%) as seen in top. So you may be running with .50 load avg, and 99.9% idle cpu. Heck, you can be running 1.75 load avg and 99.9% idle. Anyway, check top to see what processes are doing, and what the cpu states line says. -- Darrin Chandler | Phoenix BSD Users Group [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://bsd.phoenix.az.us/ http://www.stilyagin.com/ |
