AFAIK, the load average (speaking in thread and OS terms) is the number of
processes marked 'ready to run' in the scheduler queue, that have been marked
that status for more than one iteration over the scheduler queue. This is
explained very well in "Building your own 32bit OS". I'd recommend this book
to anyone interested in OSes, it is a very good book, and discusess memory
management, scheduling, kernel architecture and such. However, it is a book
about a microkernel style architecture, and not a monolithic (Linux) style
kernel. It also focuses very heavily on how to implement message passing and
how to do it efficiently in an OS.
--Perry
>
> On Sun, 22 Feb 1998 linker@nightshade.ml.org wrote:
> >
> > It's the average number of processes in the run queue (as you said).
> >
> > This means it's the number of processes that are fighting for the cpu..
> > Thus it's tells you how many processes arn't getting cpu time.. So if you
> > are not SMP a load avg of 1 says your cpu is completely in use and as it
> > increases it's telling you that your system is becoming bogged down..
> Well, with a load of 20 vi still seems to be very responsive.
> Maybe it counts Zombies to... And zombies do not need any cpu time, they
> just need a willing parent.
> --
> dec1: 4:54pm up 7 days, 21:30, 6 users, load average: 0.23, 0.13, 0.10
>
>
> -
> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
> the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
>
-- Perry Harrington Linux rules all OSes. APSoft () email: perry@apsoft.com Think Blue. /\- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu