[NTLUG:Discuss] Server load average - what is it?

[Tophat James]

That's easy... It's the average number of processes that are waiting
during that time.  and the numbers have different meanings for different
machines.  On single CPU machines, a higher load average is expected
than on a multiple CPU machine.  


On Wed, 2005-06-15 at 18:56 -0500, Richard Geoffrion wrote:
> 'w', uptime, procinfo and others will show a system load average in 1,5, and
> 10 minute increments.
> 
> but what do the numbers mean??? does a 1.00 mean 100% utilization?? if so.
> what does 1.70 mean?  or even 4.77?
> 
> Surely they don't mean 170% utilization.   Maybe it means that the server is
> 70% overutilized.  Or maybe  1.7% of total capacity??  Of course that's not
> the case because at 4.77, my server comes to a grinding crawl.. (three
> dirvish jobs looped each other one weekend....oops.)
> 
> anyway... I've googled for system load average explained..and no one is
> explaining what the numbers MEAN...meaning what the scale is a scale OF.
> 
> thx.
>