[CoLoCo] Odd load for sleep mode

[Jim Hutchinson]

On Mon, Sep 22, 2008 at 3:50 PM, Scott Scriven
<ubuntu-us-co at toykeeper.net>wrote:

> * Chris Yoder <chris at medioh.com> wrote:
> > Or you could just run top in a terminal window, but it isn't as pretty.
>
> Top is okay, but it misses some important resources, and the
> display isn't as human-readable as a graph.
>
> > 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.
>
> Nope, the load average isn't just CPU time.  It's the number of
> processes waiting on the kernel for any reason at all.  For a
> demonstration, try this...  Open two shells.  In each, run 'cat
> /dev/sda > /dev/null'.  Let it run for a while, and watch the
> system load and the CPU use.  The loadavg should stabilize right
> at 2, while the CPU load stays down around 10%.


Is this why I sometimes see a high load when copying a large file even
though cpu usage is fairly low?


-- 
Jim (Ubuntu geek extraordinaire)
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