> Am 25.10.2023 um 17:57 schrieb Theo de Raadt <dera...@openbsd.org>: > > Mike Fischer <fischer+o...@lavielle.com> wrote: > >>> Am 25.10.2023 um 17:29 schrieb Theo de Raadt <dera...@openbsd.org>: >>> >>> Mike Fischer <fisc...@lavielle.com> wrote: >>> >>>> True. But like I said, this was noticed because of the sudden increase on >>>> the same (OpenBSD) machine without any obvious reason. >>> >>> The reason is obvious. >>> >>> You installed a completely different system. >> >> No, there is a misunderstanding here. I have not been comparing OpenBSD load >> averages to those on any other OS. > > No, it is *your misunderstanding* > > We put no effort into maintaining stability of this damn number.
Ok, I realise that load average may too irrelevant a measurement to take seriously. I admit that I thought this value was somewhat consistent in the context of a single running machine, but maybe I was wrong. > We changed a lot of kernel scheduling code *without giving a damn about the > stability of this number* Fine, but you are not changing my running Kernel, are you? Or are you saying that the load average does not carry *any* inherent information and is utterly useless? That would almost imply that this is a (poor) sort of random number generator. OTOH years of monitoring this value (amongst many other measurements) on OpenBSD seems to indicate some correlation to what the machine is doing. But I get what you are saying: no guarantees. > It is a different system. To reiterate: I am measuring load averages on OpenBSD 7.4. On a running system I notice a sudden jump in the value which persists for several hours. That gets my attention because I can see no reason for this jump. So I’m trying to figure out the cause. Please note that I am not going on the assumption that there is a bug or that something needs to be changed/fixed in OpenBSD. The jump may have had perfectly valid reasons. Or it may have been random with a low probability. But given all of the feedback from this thread I’ll deprecate this part of my monitoring and switch to monitoring actual CPU activity (as reported by e.g. vmstat) in the hopes that these values are more accurate/consistent and that they better reflect the workload of the machine. Thanks everyone! Mike
