interpreting uptime output

[Chuck Swiger]

On Mar 29, 2007, at 11:00 AM, Laszlo Nagy wrote:
[ ...about the "uptime" command... ]
> This is great, except that it does not tell me what "0.5" means?  
> Example:
>
> 1:41PM  up 5 days,  2:22, 4 users, load averages: 0.36, 0.42, 0.51
>
> The only referenced material in the man page is w(1) which tells this:
>
> > The load average numbers give the number of jobs in the run queue  
> averaged over 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
>
> What are those "jobs"? I guess they are not processes. What is that  
> "run queue"? Which is better, the lower or the higher number?

A job is a runnable process.  The run queue is a list containing the  
processes which are runnable at a particular time.  Lower numbers  
indicate lower CPU load.  From "man getloadavg":

> DESCRIPTION
>      The getloadavg() function returns the number of processes in  
> the system
>      run queue averaged over various periods of time.  Up to nelem  
> samples are
>      retrieved and assigned to successive elements of loadavg[].   
> The system
>      imposes a maximum of 3 samples, representing averages over the  
> last 1, 5,
>      and 15 minutes, respectively.


-- 
-Chuck