Date: Tue, 10 Mar 1998 15:22:57 -0800 From: Jamie Lawrence <jal@42is.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Load Averages: what exactly do they mean? Message-ID: <3.0.3.32.19980310152257.00a5b3c0@colonel.42inc.com> In-Reply-To: <19980306164853.AAA27430@stimpy>
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Hi - >From my reading of Design and Implementation of BSD4.4 my understanding of the load average calculation is that it is the total of the number of processes ready to run or waiting on IO divided by the total number of processes. This implies that it should never go above 1. However, I've seen it bounce above 1 before, and on other BSD variants, it does, too: xxxxxx:~> uname -a ; w | head -1 BSD/OS xxxxxx.xxxxxxxx.com 2.1 BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 Kernel #1: Sat May 25 18:58:46 PDT 1996 panic@xxxxx.xxxxxxxx.com:/usr/src/sys/compile/XANADU i386 6:38PM up 115 days, 8:06, 5 users, load averages: 1.65, 1.55, 1.59 On Solaris boxes I manage, it regularly stays above 1 (in one test situation where an Ultra 1 was being intentionally hammered, it sat between 11 and 12 for hours), but I attributed this to System V strangeness. What exactly is the load average, and how is it calculated? Thanks. -j To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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