> Wouldn't know exactly, depends a lot on what your system does in general. But
> if it starts running on more than 50 for a single user machine, I'd start
IF *my* box got a load average of >50, I'd be pulling my hair out one
strand at a time :).
Seriously, a load average of 50 is *extremely* high - eepecially for a
desktop - and probably so for a "server" as well. It literally means that
50 jobs are in the run queue (load average is defined as the number of
processes running or waiting to run within a period of time, repored in
units of 1, 5, and 15 minutes).
If you had a fast processor many of those processes would complete sooner
than the granularity of w(1), and wouldn't impact the load average as
severely.
Incidentally, the most my box has ever gotten on its own through "normal"
use was ca. a load average of 24 when I sent through a bunch of stuff to a
couple hundered addresses at the same time. But even then that didn't last
too long before the system started to become more responsive as the
individual copies of sendmail(1) finished on their own. However, through
doing things like repeated finds and md5sums, one can (at least artificially)
pump the load average up to >50 or even higher and still be a bit responsive
but that really depends on how fast your processor is.
> Paul
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David E. Fox Thanks for letting me
[EMAIL PROTECTED] change magnetic patterns
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