> What does the load average in TOP mean? One of our user is trying > to run a HUGE spreadsheet in open office. Running TOP I see that up > to 97% of the CPU usage gets allotted and the CPU "Load Average" is > showing averages of 1, 5 & 15 minutes ranging between 3.8 ~ 1.2 I > want to know what this figure mean? Is this indicating that the > processor is getting loaded beyond the capacity (and hence slow > down??) >
Its the average number of processes wanting to use a processor in the last x minutes. I think. So a load average of 1 could mean that 1 processes has been using the processor solidly for the last 1 minute or it could mean that 6 processors have each done 10 seconds processing for the last minute.
Also processes waiting for disk are counted but not idle ones hence if your io is the bottle neck load will go up and up while your processor is actually doing nothing (or practically nothing) Any load over 50 is bad and probably means you need more processors but is not unlikly if you have 50 people all tring to compile at once on the same computer.
Did you ever try to format an IDE Soft RAID?
I remember having a load average of 250 ca., half an hour constant load.
Of course on a not-yet production system.
(And Softraid was, because of low budget, better choice than no RAID at all).
For sure, / is not on /dev/ataraid :-)
Anselm
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