load > 1, no process using >10% CPU...?
Rob MacGregor
freebsd.macgregor at blueyonder.co.uk
Tue Apr 19 23:09:55 PDT 2005
On Wednesday, April 20, 2005 2:20 AM, Damian Gerow <> unleashed the infinite
monkeys and produced:
> Until the build failed. Now top /still/ isn't showing me much. systat -vm
> is showing me at just under 100% User, with little to no disk activity.
>
> I'm a little fuzzy as to /how/ load is calculated, but why would my system
> think that it's doing all kinds of work when ps, top, and systat can't
> really tell me /what/ it's doing?
The "load" is the number of active processes (the number of processes in the run
queue). That's all it measures - not CPU load, disk I/O or anything else -
purely the number of processes in the run queue.
Load and processor usage aren't linked. If the processes are I/O bound (for
example) then while the system load may be high, the actual CPU usage may well
be low.
Google produced http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/ldavg1.shtml, which
isn't a bad description of the load average, though heavily based on Linux.
--
Rob | Oh my God! They killed init! You bastards!
More information about the freebsd-stable
mailing list