[wplug] system load

Patrick Wagstrom patrick at wagstrom.net
Mon Jul 28 12:34:20 EDT 2008


Another quick and useful tool when debugging system load issues is dstat. 
While it doesn't list stats by process, it does aggregate useful thinks 
like IO Interrupts, Disk activity, network activity, etc, into one 
continually updated stream.

As a bonus its got ANSI color like it's 1991 and you're dialing into WWIV.

--Patrick

James O'Kane wrote:
> 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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>>>
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