On Wednesday 21 Nov 2007, Yashpal Nagar wrote: > Hi All, > > From the man pages of uptime, you get > > Print the current time, the length of time the system has been up, > the number of users on the system, and the average number of jobs > in the run queue over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes. > > But when actually you run uptime, you get load average instead > [EMAIL PROTECTED]:/var/log/sa> uptime > 12:36pm up 223 days 3:05, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 > > How does the jobs in the queue and load average relates to each > other. could anybody help me to understand ?
This has been explained a number of times. The last time was in 2004 :) http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi/7466/focus=7487 There was also a post on LIH in (yes!) 2001 by yours truly. Enclosing that: In Unix, a user process can be either ready to run or waiting for some event (eg I/O completion, sleep, etc). The system splits processor time between ready-to-run processes through the scheduling algorithm built into the kernel. At any given time, then, one process is running while other ready-to-run processes are waiting for their turn on the processor(s). (This is ignoring the kernel itself, which also uses the processor.) The three load average numbers are the average number of processes which were ready to run and awaiting their turn on the processor in the past 1, 5 and 15 minutes. In other words, a first load average number of 7 would mean that in the past minute, at any given time, on the average there were 7 processes which were ready to run but not running due to lack of processor time. So in a sense the load average is a measure of the load on the system. Higher load averages mean that the processor is unable to handle the demands put onto it by the tasks running in the system. However, there are no fixed measures for defining what load average is high and what is low. I personally would start getting worried if a server under my control was consistently showing load averages higher than, say, 5; on the other hand, it all depends on what sort of tasks the server is doing and how fast and often the kernel does context switches. Regards, -- Raju -- Raj Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/ Freedom in Technology & Software || February 2008 || http://freed.in/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves _______________________________________________ ilugd mailinglist -- ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd Next Event: http://freed.in - February 22/23, 2008 Archives at: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.user-groups.linux.delhi http://www.mail-archive.com/ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org/
