on Wed, Nov 28, 2001 at 12:40:54PM -0000, 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...
The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD defines the load average as follows:
load average A measure of the CPU load on the system. The load average in 4.4BSD is defined as an average of the number of processes ready to run or waiting for disk I/O to complete, as sampled over the previous 1-minute interval of system operation.
although page 94 of the same book says:
...where the load is a sampled average of the sum of the lengths of the run queue and of the short-term sleep queue over the previous 1-minute interval of system operation.
and a more recent NetBSD man page states:
The kvm_getloadavg() function returns the number of processes in the sys- tem run queue of the kernel indicated by kd, averaged over various peri- ods of time.
The run queue is a list of processes that are ready to be executed whenever there's some cpu time for them to run. That is, the process isn't waiting for any kind of I/O or other operation that could cause the process to sleep, waiting for the operation to complete.
Linux appears to compute the load average in a similar way in /usr/src/linux/fs/proc/array.c line 229, in the function "get_loadavg". I don't know if/how much this relates to your situation though. :)
3.66 strikes me as a fairly busy machine. Generally I find as the load average approaches the 10-20 range, it can get quite slow with interactive operation (eg, typing things in at the console, ssh, etc).