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Date:      Fri, 9 Jul 1999 20:30:30 +1200
From:      "Dan Langille" <junkmale@xtra.co.nz>
To:        David Greenman <dg@root.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Uptime basics!!! 
Message-ID:  <19990709083321.GYOW112692.mta2-rme@wocker>
In-Reply-To: <199907090241.TAA04489@implode.root.com>
References:  Your message of "Fri, 09 Jul 1999 11:50:04 %2B1000."             <002201bec9ad$5d7d4ad0$4001a8c0@tasajohns.turnaround.com.au> 

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On 8 Jul 99, at 19:41, David Greenman wrote:

>    Uh, no, that is not what the load average means. The load average is a
> composite number that includes both runnable processes and processes that
> are blocked in a short term wait (usually disk I/O). This means that for
> machines that are doing heavy disk I/O, the load average could be quite
> high even when the CPU is 95% idle. On wcarchive, for example, the load
> average typically runs around 40-50 with 50% CPU idle time. This may sound
> high, but there are 38 disk drives on the machine, so although the drives
> are fairly busy, the I/O is spread out over all of them - keeping the
> interactive response time low and overall performance quite high.

Where is this documented?  I was trying to locate just this very 
information during the past week.  Nothing in man uptime.  If it belongs 
there, I volunteer to update it.  How?
--
Dan Langille - DVL Software Limited
The FreeBSD Diary     - http://www.FreeBSDDiary.org/freebsd/
NZ FreeBSD User Group - http://www.nzfug.nz.freebsd.org/
The Racing System     - http://www.racingsystem.com/racingsystem.htm


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