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
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