View Single Post
  #3   (View Single Post)  
Old 22nd July 2008
18Googol2's Avatar
18Googol2 18Googol2 is offline
Real Name: whoami
Spam Deminer
 
Join Date: Apr 2008
Location: pwd
Posts: 283
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by corey_james View Post
We have a linux server at work that runs at a constant load average of 70-85.
This strikes me as VERY odd as this number is awfully high for a server that is still extremely responsive. Even stranger is that the cpu idle time ( shown by top ) shows that all 4 of the cpus are sitting at 90%+ idle time.

I've never seen a unix ( or unix-like ) system get a load average above 6. Is the calculation linux uses for load average different from *BSD and solaris or is this system just a little funky?
cpu load and cpu usage are not neccesarily the same. The load average is simply the number of jobs the cpu needs to execute within certain period of time. The job may be very intensive, may be not. If not, thats why the load average is high but the system is still responsive.

I know there was a forum under DoS (both distributed and non-distributed), the load average reported went over 100.
Reply With Quote