Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2004 14:04:20 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> To: Jamie <jamie@gnulife.org> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Monitoring load average - healthy figure? Message-ID: <40647EB4.5080802@mac.com> In-Reply-To: <20040325211934.F21612@floyd.gnulife.org> References: <20040325211934.F21612@floyd.gnulife.org>
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Jamie wrote: > I've googled the results, and I've seen a couple posts from people > who claim that the general rule of thumb is that your load average should > be less than the number of CPU's. I don't know what OS they were referring > to, however. Does this sound right for FreeBSD? Are there better ways of > monitoring load average? If the load average is greater than the # of CPU's, your machine is CPU-bound and tasks are waiting to get processor time. If that's because the machine is a busy server, one ought to add more resources or rebalance the load. If this happens because you're running a screensaver or setiathome, you probably don't care. :-) I use a warning system which notifies me (via email) if the 5-minute load average on one of my servers goes too high, which I've set at 2.5 for single-proc machines, 4.5 for dual-procs, and 7 for the single quad-proc box I've got. YMMV. -- -Chuck
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