William T Wilson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > It's a good guess. In technical terms the load average is simply the > average number of processes in the runnable state over a period of time. > You could take an instantaneous measurement of the number of processes in > the runnable state, but it wouldn't be a meaningful number. (In fact, > this information is already produced by ps - running processes are marked > with 'R'). It's entirely possible that a lightly loaded system could have > many running processes at any particular moment, or that a heavily loaded > system could have few.
Come to think of it, I too would like to have a more fine-grained cpu load measurement. I want my machine to suspend after a period of no mouse/keyboard activity and minimal cpu load. Right now I check the latter by looking at /proc/loadavg, except these numbers quickly reach zero, even when I have a streaming mp3 playing in the background. The idea is, I don't want the machine to suspend if it's playing an mp3. I only want it to suspend if it is doing practically nothing. -chris
