On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Wimprine, Thomas wrote:
> I've looked in the top man page and didn't see anything real quick. What
> scale does the "load average" use? At what point is the system running at
> 100%?
The 3 load average numbers are the average number of processes in the run
queue for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. There really is no "scale", it
just depends on how powerful your machine is. A large machine might run
fine with a consistent load avg over 10, whereas a smaller machine would
start choking around 3.
Running at 100% of what? The main things you want to check is cpu,
memory, disk i/o, and network i/o. Vmstat is a quick and powerful tool to
check cpu and memory. Run 'vmstat 10', wait 10 seconds, and look at your
cpu columns (us=user, sy=system, id=idle) to see how much idle cpu time
you have. If idle cpu time is always low (under 20%), then you have a cpu
bottleneck. Then look at the swap columns (si=swapin, so=swapout). If
you're constantly swapping, then you might have a memory problem. You can
also run 'iostat -x 10' to check which partition/disk is busiest, to
pinpoint any disk/controller i/o bottlenecks.
ray
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Received on 12/18/03
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