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Examining Load Average

Issue 152

From Issue #152
December 2006

Dec 01, 2006  By Ray Walker
 in
Understanding work-load averages as opposed to CPU usage.
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load ave

DD's picture
Submitted by DD (not verified) on Tue, 11/09/2010 - 17:34.

I have been trying to figure out what those 3 numbers meant. Thanks for the article. How does hyperthreading play into the number of lanes? Is that additive or do I just count the total # of cores?

Thanks for the article

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 08/14/2010 - 12:56.

It is really good article, till now following load avg values blindly.
This article given clear understanding.

Thank you for the article,

Andy23's picture
Submitted by Andy23 (not verified) on Sun, 06/13/2010 - 06:27.

Thank you for the article, now i've understood the difference.
But what about hyperthreading?

VPS environment

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 04/15/2010 - 21:24.

I'm curious, how does top report load average on a VPS? is it reporting on the VPS's average or the server machine's?

Just thought I put it out there.. thanks for any replies.

great article

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Sat, 04/10/2010 - 15:57.

this certainly answered a lot of questions for me. great article. thanks!

How to get CPU load inf in terms of Percentage

Vikram's picture
Submitted by Vikram (not verified) on Tue, 01/12/2010 - 08:12.

CPU load average, we can get using many commands, but how to get this average value in terms of percentage

Is there any formula for it? searched in google couldnt get right information on how to get this percentile value

Thanks
Vikram

multi core procs

ubergoober's picture
Submitted by ubergoober (not verified) on Thu, 03/05/2009 - 15:52.

So how does this apply to multi core cpu's?
If I have 4 quad core cpu's in my system then do I still only have 4 lanes on my highway? or do I have 16?

Thanks,
Dave

You have one lane per core in

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 02/11/2010 - 10:19.

You have one lane per core in the system.
So a system with 4 CPUs, each with one core would be a 4-lane highway (as stated in the article) - or you can think of it as 4 single lane highways.
If you have a single quad-core then you have a 4-lane highway.

If you have 4 quad-core CPUs, then you have 4 4-land highways (or a single 16-lane highway).

Nice & useful article ! I'd

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 02/06/2009 - 00:15.

Nice & useful article !

I'd like to mention here that the timeslices of each task are NOT 10 ms, but 100 ms as an average (nice val 0) & goes down to 10 ms (assuming HZ=100) for nice val -19.
This is ofcourse for the pre-CFS days, which is when I believe the article was written

Load Average

Deven Patankar's picture
Submitted by Deven Patankar (not verified) on Thu, 01/03/2008 - 01:16.

Always had a confusion about load avg, thanks to your article it is clear now. Great Article

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