50 lines
2.1 KiB
Text
50 lines
2.1 KiB
Text
<page xmlns="http://projectmallard.org/1.0/"
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type="topic" style="task"
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id="process-loadaverage">
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<info>
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<revision version="0.1" date="2011-08-19" status="stub"/>
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<link type="guide" xref="index" group="processes-info" />
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<credit type="author copyright">
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<name>Phil Bull</name>
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<email>philbull@gmail.com</email>
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<years>2011</years>
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</credit>
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<credit type="author copyright">
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<name>Michael Hill</name>
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<email>mdhillca@gmail.com</email>
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<years>2011</years>
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</credit>
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<desc>The <em>load average</em> tells you how much work your computer has
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been doing over the past few minutes.</desc>
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</info>
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<title>What is the load average?</title>
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<comment>
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<cite date="2011-06-18" href="mailto:philbull@gmail.com">Phil Bull</cite>
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<p>Explain how to interpret the load averages quoted on the Processes tab.</p>
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</comment>
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<p>The <gui>load average</gui> shows the load on the CPU over three different
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time intervals, one minute, five minutes and fifteen minutes. These are displayed
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on the <gui>Processes</gui> tab above the process list, and are an indicator of
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system processing capacity.</p>
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<p>The <em>load</em> is the number of processes currently running plus the
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number of processes <em>queued</em> to run on the system's CPU(s). A load
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showing a utilization of 100% would be roughly 1.0 times the number of CPUs or
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<link xref="cpu-multicore">cores</link> in the system; load averages constantly
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hitting this number would indicate that the system is fully-loaded with no
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processes waiting for processor time. Lower numbers indicate that the system's
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processing power is sufficient for the processes being run, while numbers that
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are consistently higher might mean more processing power is needed.</p>
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<p>Three intervals are shown so that spikes and trends in the numbers can be
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taken into account: if the load average spikes higher in the one- or
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five-minute intervals, but settles down below the 100% mark over the
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fifteen-minute interval, system processing capacity is probably sufficient.</p>
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</page>
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