[CoLoCo] Odd load for sleep mode

[Scott Scriven]

* Jim Hutchinson <jim at ubuntu-rocks.org> wrote:
> Having never seen numbers like that I was a bit worried 
> something abnormal was going on. I know waking is going to be 
> somewhat intensive but on my desktop even under the greatest 
> load I've ever put on it I've never seen much above 4 so 9 
> seemed way out of proportion. However, I can see that it's a 
> very short time to measure anything. Maybe I should watch it 
> over several minutes as it should fall rapidly.

I haven't found load average to be a very useful measure of 
what's going on in the system.  There's no way to tell the 
difference between load generated by an active CPU and load 
generated by an idle process waiting on I/O.  And it doesn't 
really say anything about the system's capacity.  On some 
systems, a load of 1.3 would represent an over-full system, where 
on others a load of 300 shows underutilization.

I find it more useful to monitor resources individually instead 
of lumping them into a single value.  Here's a screen shot with 
some system stats along the right edge and the lower-left corner.  
It gives me a pretty good idea what the system is doing, and 
which resources are low:

  http://toykeeper.net/tmp/chi.2008-07-16.png

Hopefully it's self-explanatory, but let me know if it's not.  :)


-- Scott