[wplug] system load

[James O'Kane]

On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:57 PM, Michael Semcheski
<mhsemcheski at gmail.com> wrote:
> Lower numbers are better.  I believe its the average number of jobs in
> the processor queue over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

That's mostly right. Linux also includes things blocked for I/O. The
theory is that they could unblock from I/O and would need the CPU
again.
A rough rule of thumb might be if the number is higher than the number
of processors for an extended period, then your CPU might be too slow
for the load you want it to do. This assumes a low number of processes
blocked for I/O.  In general, I don't look at that number too much. If
I feel my workstation is performing slowly, I'll look at top or ps to
see what processes are frequently using CPU. If it's a server, I would
test the application in question to see if it's responding as fast as
you'd like it to.

Here's a good explanation from the last time someone asked:
http://www.wplug.org/pipermail/wplug/2007-August/030555.html

See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_average


> How high is too high?  If you can tell that your system is overworked
> without looking at the actual system load, then the load is too high.
>
> Mike
>
> On Sat, Jul 19, 2008 at 11:40 PM, Zach Uram <netrek at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I'm not sure exactly how Linux calculates the system load. What is a
>> good system load and what is bad?
>>
>> Right now my system feels rather sluggish and I have:
>>
>> load average: 0.84, 0.91, 1.07
>>
>> Zach
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