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Date:      Fri, 09 Jul 1999 01:38:05 -0700
From:      David Greenman <dg@root.com>
To:        junkmale@xtra.co.nz
Cc:        freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Uptime basics!!! 
Message-ID:  <199907090838.BAA08058@implode.root.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 09 Jul 1999 20:30:30 %2B1200." <19990709083321.GYOW112692.mta2-rme@wocker> 

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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?

   It should be documented in the man page for 'uptime' and 'w', but I see
that 'w' gets it wrong and 'uptime' doesn't say anything.

-DG

David Greenman
Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project - http://www.freebsd.org
Creator of high-performance Internet servers - http://www.terasolutions.com


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