 | | | Meaning of 'load ' on Linux | Meaning of 'load ' on Linux 2005-06-19 - By Tim Edwards
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Ken Snider wrote:
>
> Load average is a useless indicator, alone, of an issue.
>
> In this environment, the load is almost *always* at about 50 (more for a
> slashdotting :) ), because on a server that literally gets millions of
> hits a day, there's a good chunk of requests/sec coming in. But both the
> CPU and IO load of the server are very low, the server moving only a
> MB/sec of data via IO, and the CPU's at about 25% utilization. And this
> is moving about 12Mbit/sec of HTTP data around, no less.
>
> This box is positively *bored* compared to our application servers which
> have only a few daemons on them, and move 10-20MB/sec of IO, have two
> processors running at about 75%, and are running with loads of about 1-2
> on average.
>
> About the only benefit I've ever seen for load average? It's a good
> *baseline*. Since I know the boingboing server runs with an average load
> of about 50, if I suddenly see it with a load of 100, well, I know
> something's up. by the same token, our servers with an average load of 1
> worry me when they approach 2.5+.
>
I had a server that had a load average of 390 and it was perfectly
alright - it was responsive and was still running a 35GB oracle database
used by our developers. The reason for the load avg was a hung NFS share
that was causing the df command to hang waiting on IO, which in turn
caused the nagios check_disk commands to hang and pile up.
--
Tim Edwards
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