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