Load over 1000

[David G. Lawrence]

> aren't being serviced isn't a bug.  The reason the load on systems with
> many processes is typically low is that most processes are blocked on I/O
> -- either waiting for it to complete, waing for a network packet, or
> waiting for the user, so they're idle the rest of the time.  The CPU sits
> there waiting for the world to catch up...

   The load average has historically meant the number of processes either
running/ready to run OR blocked by short term (disk I/O) wait. So the load
average can be high even when the CPU isn't highly loaded. Back in the
days of wcarchive.cdrom.com, it was not uncommon to see a load average
of 60 while the CPU was 90% idle.

-DG

David G. Lawrence
President
Download Technologies, Inc. - http://www.downloadtech.com - (866) 399 8500
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