On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 11:36:44PM +0800, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On Sat, 25 Mar 2000, Ruben van der Leij wrote:
>
> > On Sat, Mar 25, 2000 at 12:48:04PM +0000, Andreas Aardal Hanssen wrote:
> >
> > > Does anyone have any idea what could be the problem? The
> > > disk IO is very low and my computer is *really* sleeping,
> > > with a load average (uptime etc) of approx. 1.4..
> >
> > A loadaverage of 1.4 means you have on average 1.4 task waiting to run. Or,
> > to put it in percentages: your machine has 140% of it's time filled with
> > tasks that want to run.
>
> > Even for an idle quad Xeon, that is way to high.
Um, no. Even if you (incorrectly) express load average as a percentage of
processing capacity in use, a load average of 1.4 on a 4-way system would
still only indicate 35% of available capacity in use.
It is also very possible to achieve high load averages without using 100% of
your processor. I've seen machines with one processor, that regularly have a
load average over 2, and are only using 10-15% of the processor.
> I agree. I manage a similar system (quad Xeon, 1GB memory) with a
> loadaverage of 0.3 or thereabouts.
In other words, your quad Xeon is being wasted. You could replace it with a
single Pentium II or Pentium III machine.
> Although I'm not familiar with the intricacies of how load is
> distributed across multiple CPUs among different OS's, I would suspect
> something is wrong with your system.
That is an absolutely terrible thing to say. You don't know anything about
his system (and obviously, not enough about Unix or computers in general) to
make an accurate analysis based on his post. Please refrain from saying such
things in the future unless you're sure you know what you're talking about.
--Adam
