f9: question on load average
Patrick O'Callaghan
pocallaghan at gmail.com
Mon Sep 15 14:34:55 UTC 2008
On Mon, 2008-09-15 at 10:46 +0200, Dario Lesca wrote:
> Hello! Why on this system the value of load average is so Higt?
>
> > top - 10:42:27 up 3 days, 16:22, 1 user, load average: 5.08, 5.05, 5.01
> > Tasks: 166 total, 1 running, 165 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> > Cpu0 : 0.0%us, 0.3%sy, 0.0%ni, 99.7%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
> > Cpu1 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
> > Cpu2 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
> > Cpu3 : 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
> > Mem: 2074912k total, 2014468k used, 60444k free, 40k buffers
> > Swap: 3571704k total, 60k used, 3571644k free, 1826260k cached
>
> On other system when the CPUs are 100% idle, the load average is 0,00 0,00 0,00
"Load average" is a running average of the number of ready processes,
i.e. those that could do something if they had the cpu. Processes that
are waiting for something to happen, e.g. I/O to complete, can't use the
cpu even if it's idle. Thus it's perfectly possible to have the cpu
doing nothing while the load average is high. It often means you have
some long I/O operation on a slow disk system e.g. copying a DVD to an
external USB device, or multiple downloads waiting for data to arrive
from the net.
poc
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