Unusually high LA without any load at FreeBSD9-BETA2

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Sep 6 17:39:16 UTC 2011


In message <4E66547D.2030907 at cran.org.uk>, Bruce Cran writes:
>On 06/09/2011 18:05, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> What is "LA"?
>
>Load Average?

We should kille the load avarage as a measure for system activity,
it only has any relevance if you run heavy CPU bound processes.

If the majority of your threads yield their quantum, load average
contains absolutely no information of any relevance to system
capacity.

Try this:

	main()
		for (i = 0; i < 10000; i++)
			start thread {
				calculate time until top of next second
				sleep (until then)
			}

You'll see a monster load-avg on idle cpus.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


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