[CoLoCo] Odd load for sleep mode

[Chris Yoder]

Or you could just run top in a terminal window, but it isn't as pretty.

Load average can be vaguely useful as a good idea of the load average
over time, but do keep in mind that you can see a spike in the first
average, and not really effect the 15 minute average.

I'd have to read the source to make sure, but normally a process
blocked on IO does not contribute to the load,  because the load
average is the number of threads waiting to get onto the cpu, as a
simplistic rule of thumb.

Again, if you want to know how it is truly calculated, use the source, luke!

On Sun, Sep 7, 2008 at 4:22 PM, Scott Scriven
<ubuntu-us-co at toykeeper.net> wrote:
> * 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
>
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