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Today's Topics:
1. Re: system load average and top (Mr.Anderson)
2. Re: system load average and top (Mr.Anderson)
3. Re: system load average and top (Ken Snider)
--__--__--
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 10:14:53 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: [rhn-users] system load average and top
From: "Mr.Anderson" <mr anderson comsystems net>
To: <rhn-users redhat com>
Reply-To: rhn-users redhat com
>> Hi, I'm currently having some weird readings on my machine.
Here's
> the
>> output of top.
>>
>> 10:54am up 42 days, 14:28, 2 users, load average: 15.73,
14.17,
> 16.45
>> 284 processes: 279 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
>> CPU states: 5.9% user, 14.1% system, 0.0% nice, 79.9%
idle
>> Mem: 514696K av, 473584K used, 41112K free, 0K
shrd,
> 91628K
>> buff Swap: 1048088K av, 25280K used, 1022808K free
104152K
>> cached
>>
>> Does this makes sense? The CPU has no load and yet the load
average
> is
>> high? Any ideas?
>>
>> Thanks for any info.
>>
>>
>>
>> Deks
>
> Umm...What do you mean "the CPU has no load"? It's at 20% used
(79.9%
> idle). 20% usage is a lot depending on your CPU Mhz. If CPU is
at 20%
> used, and the load average is at 15% at first glance seems ok.
So a
> quick
> guess without looking at the processes is it's normal.
>
> Do you notice any weird processes running? Type:
>
> 'ps aux |more'
>
> to see current processes with userid running it. Look
carefully at the
> list and see if there's any process you don't recognize.
>
> Mr.Anderson
>
>
>> Deks wrote:
>
> Yes there seem to be load on the CPU but most of the time its
on the
> range 79-98% and yet my load average would jump to 40-50+.
This machine
> is an P3 1.2Ghz and I run listserv which uses sendmail. And
sendmail
> processes only eats up 0.1% of the CPU all the time.
>
> Thanks.
Well, I'm guessing here to try to point you in the right
direction.
Sendmail processes eating 0.1% is good. That seems normal.
Perhaps when
Sendmail is about to send out onto your listserv that's when your
load
average jumps to 40-50%. After the listserv is done it should go
back
down. If that's the case on your system then all that sounds
normal to me.
What you can do is let top run continuously and watch the load
average.
Once it jumps to 40 or 50 press 'CTRL-D' or just the 'q' key (for
quit)
and look at the process list. The first 2 or 3 are the current
processes
that are using the most system resources. This will tell you what
process
(program) is causing the jump to 40-50% usage.
Hope this helps.
Mr.Anderson
--__--__--
Message: 2
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 10:19:01 -0800 (PST)
Subject: Re: [rhn-users] system load average and top
From: "Mr.Anderson" <mr anderson comsystems net>
To: <rhn-users redhat com>
Reply-To: rhn-users redhat com
>> Umm...What do you mean "the CPU has no load"? It's at 20%
used (79.9%
>> idle). 20% usage is a lot depending on your CPU Mhz. If CPU
is at 20%
>> used, and the load average is at 15% at first glance seems
ok. So a
>> quick guess without looking at the processes is it's
normal.
>
> "load" as defined by top is not necessarily the same thing as
cpu
> utilization. I've been told that load is the average length
of the
> ready-to-run queue for processes... basically, you could
theoretically
> have a bunch of stuff blocking on IO leading to a high load
but low CPU
> utilization.
>
> Of course, I may have a completely garbled understanding of
the
> explanation, but, neverthless... :)
>
> Bret
Wow, I'm glad you pointed this out. It makes sense and is
completely true.
Thanks,
Mr.Anderson
--__--__--
Message: 3
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2003 14:32:35 -0500
From: Ken Snider <ksnider flarn com>
To: rhn-users redhat com
Subject: Re: [rhn-users] system load average and top
Reply-To: rhn-users redhat com
Mr.Anderson wrote:
> Wow, I'm glad you pointed this out. It makes sense and is
completely true.
A load average is literally the number of processes "running"
during any
given sample interval. The Linux kernel determines this load
every 10
seconds or so, and averages this over a minute (so six samples).
That
becomes your one minute load average.
It has *absolutely* nothing *whatsoever* to do with CPU
utilization. If you
have 100 processes blocking on IO, it is fully possible to have a
load of
100 and a CPU utilization of nearly 0%.
--
Ken Snider
--__--__--
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