> > 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.
Certainly. It really depends on your application mix, and what resources get
hit the hardest. If memory serves, the rule of thumb is that you don't need
to worry about your CPU as long as the average run queue is at or below 4
per CPU. (So a 2-processor system can have a run queue of 8.)
Thomas, a good book on this kind of stuff is O'Reilly's _System Performance
Tuning_. Both the first and second editions are worthwhile reading.
___________________
Nolug mailing list
nolug@nolug.org
Received on 12/18/03
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : 12/19/08 EST