Arch Linux

tonyisnt

Member

Registered: 2008-03-18

Posts: 158

Load averages

From what I understand of them, 1.00 was supposed to represent at-or-around 100% load.  For the longest time this made sense to me and when I wasn't really doing anything the averages would be really low.

But right now they are: load average: 2.69, 2.93, 3.00.

Hmm.

I actually noticed this probably a week ago.  I don't know when the change occurred to pinpoint anything that could have changed it, but at low-stress usage it hovers around 3 and for full-load it is about twice that, at 6.  What could be the cause of this and should I be worrying?

(Possibly related, though I'm not sure... I've been having trouble at startup from time to time, getting DMA errors I believe.  Usually I let things sit for a little while and try to turn the computer on again and I won't get the error.)

fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,231

Website

Re: Load averages

"Load" is a grey area... AFAIK, it covers CPU, RAM and I/O... So if you have a bottleneck in your I/O (for example, from a hard drive with DMA errors ) then the Load Average will go up due to that.

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pointone

Wiki Admin

From: Waterloo, ON

Registered: 2008-02-21

Posts: 379

Re: Load averages

Quite the complicated subject you raise...

See: http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001

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lucke

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2004-11-30

Posts: 4,018

Re: Load averages

Forkbomb yourself and watch the load ;-)

dmz

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2008-08-27

Posts: 881

Website

Re: Load averages

http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman01/out.ogv

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