if i may jump in...
the load average is the average number of processes in a runnable state.
it says nothing about how much cpu time is actually being used. for
instance, i run a very busy internet site (6+ million hits/day) on a
p2-300 running freebsd 4.0. the load is always up around 5 or 6,
sometimes closer to 8 or 9, because there are always 300-400 apache
processes running. however, top reports that the processor is idle
about 30% of the time.
bottom line is that top doesn't mean anything about how busy the cpu is.
it's strictly a snapshot measure of how many processes are in a runnable
state (not sleeping). if you run the distributed net rc5 client, your
machine will always have a load over 1.0, because that process is
essentially always ready to run. that doesn't mean your machine is
overloaded, or that there are too many tasks to run.
shag
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruce Guenter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Ruben van der Leij" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sat 25 Mar 2000 8:06
Subject: Re: Running qmail on a 4x Xeon 550MHz system
> On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 04:10:14PM +0100, Ruben van der Leij wrote:
> > > Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem? The
> > > disk IO is very low and my computer is *really* sleeping,
> > > with a load average (uptime etc) of approx. 1.4..
> >
> > A loadaverage of 1.4 means you have on average 1.4 task waiting to
run. Or,
> > to put it in percentages: your machine has 140% of it's time filled
with
> > tasks that want to run.
>
> Not quite. It means that, on average, 1.4 tasks were ready to run.
On
> a 4 processor machine, that means that there were still two completely
> idle CPUs. A load average of 4 would mean all 4 CPUs are 100% busy.
> --
> Bruce Guenter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
http://em.ca/~bruceg/
>
