load average calculation in linux 2.6

[Christophe Saout]

Hi,

I noticed my web server reboot while doing an rsync because the load was
too high (and my watchdog decided that something was wrong...).

The CPU was mostly idle but /proc/loadavg showed a load average of over
40.

I assume that the iowait is also used for the load average calculation.
Every process that's waiting for IO contributes a load average of one.
Right?

So rsync kept the disk busy and a lot of mail and apache processes were
waiting for it.

Is this the desired behavior or wrong?


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