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Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 17:42:02 -0800
From: "H. Peter Anvin" <hpa@transmeta.com>
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To: Ralf Baechle <ralf@uni-koblenz.de>
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Ralf Baechle wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 02:18:20PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> 
> > Numerically high load averages aren't inherently a bad thing.  There
> > isn't anything bad about a system with a loadavg of 20 if it does what
> > it should in the time you'd expect.  However, if your daemons start
> > blocking because they assume this number means badness, than that is
> > the problem, not the loadavg in itself.
> 
> The problem seems to me that the load figure doesn't express what most
> people seem to expect it to - CPU load.
> 

Actually, what most people expect it to represent is schedulability of
new tasks.  The problem is more one of:

a) Expecting a fixed relationship between the specific number and the
behaviour of the machine;
b) The long time constants.

On an 8-way machine a load average of 16 is not particularly high, even
if you only count runnable processes, for example.

	-hpa

-- 
<hpa@transmeta.com> at work, <hpa@zytor.com> in private!
"Unix gives you enough rope to shoot yourself in the foot."
http://www.zytor.com/~hpa/puzzle.txt
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