On Wed, 28 Nov 2001 12:40:54 Simon Parkes wrote:
Hi, I'm hoping someone can help lift the mist from my eyes... doing an snmpwalk of my PC on .1.3.6.1.4.1.2010.10.1.3 gives me 3 results (as expected), these are the load averages of 1, 5 and 15 mins.. Can someone tell me what might be a high value ? My 1 min load average is 3.66 most of the time.... 3.66 out of what? 100, is this a percentage? Any ideas anyone...
Simon
My understanding of these figures is that are not out of anything, i.e. the do not represent a percentage of system capacity because system capacity is not fixed - you can always give a system more work to do if you are content for all work to be done more slowly.
The figures are averages of the number of processes that are ready to run and waiting for a CPU time slot, i.e. could make immediate use of the CPU rather than waiting for I/O.
For comparison with figures like %age CPU utilisation, consider the case where you have a single process that can always use the CPU because it spends its time calcuating rather the doing I/O, but that all other processes in the system mostly sit waiting for I/O. In this case I would expect CPU utilisation of 100% and a load average of 1.
For lower load averages the CPU utilisation would, on average, be less than 100% with the implication that if you gave the system more work (more work for the CPU) you could get more throughput.
Once the load average goes above it means the CPU is not only permanently busy but there is competion for the CPU so those programs that make most use of the CPU are not longer getting it whenever they want. At this point, if you gave the system more work the overall throughput should stay the same - the system would do more things at once and each one more slowly.
As for what is a typical or a high value it rather depends on the application the machine is being put to.
Steve.