Charting server load

Zbigniew Koziol softquake-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
Fri Feb 2 02:02:38 UTC 2007


On Thursday 01 February 2007 19:31, Robert Brockway wrote:

> Getting back to William's original question, a load of 50 would mean that
> the system is sustaining a cpu bound situation which translates to an
> overloaded system in my books since processes are getting far less time on
> the cpu than they need to run optimally.

There seems to be a lot of confusion around about how load is defined. And 
indeed, it seems that it is defined differently on various systems. 

On Linux, a process that waits for I/O results counts to load. This means that 
load may be huge while CPU and RAM are almost not used. Just HD is busy...
But still that makes sense. If HD is busy it is hard to drive.. Situations are 
possible when adding CPU power or RAM available or amount of swap will not 
help. HD capability is a something that can not be easy jumped over.

When the load is huge - something goes wrong. May be just badly designed 
database queries? Too many users on the system?

For some users, large load may have no influence on their activity. For 
others, might be devastating. Depending on what they are doing and what is 
the reason of "high load".


zb.
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