Those load averages should be taken with a grain of salt. Waiting on IO will jack them through the roof, even though the processor isn't doing anything. ( man iostat for help with IO bottlenecks)
Also a load average of 1 means a 100 percent load on 1 processor. So if you have a single processor machine, and the load average is >75, I'd say it's pretty high. On the other hand, if you have a load average of 5.99 on an 8way system, you've still got plenty of spare cycles. Lastly, Linux is MUCH more stable than some other OSes. Even on a single processor system, a load average of 2 or higher (I've seen 100+) doesn't mean that the server will crash. It won't. Kev. On Thursday 18 November 2004 15:44, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Does anyone here know where to find a detailed description of the "load > > average" field in top? What is used to determine these numbers? This is > > all I have found so far: > > > > ...system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes > > > > IE: > > :top > > > > top - 14:38:06 up 1 day, 5:35, 5 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 > > ... > > ... > > > > :top > > > > 15:40:18 up 60 days, 9:59, 6 users, load average: 10.97, 10.44, > > 10.67 ... > > ... > > > > > > you can also see it in > > w > > uptime > > > > thanks > > sig > > _______________________________________________ > clug-talk mailing list > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca > Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) > **Please remove these lines when replying _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying