Uptime Widget

[brianwhi76]

Don't know where to post this.

I have an uptime widget running, and I don't understand what the load numbers mean.

Please explain.....Thanks in advance

 

[Benjamin]

loads are just how much cpu the system is using, you as a use and how much cpu is free.

 

[tag]

The load averages should consist of three numbers. These numbers are the load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes respectively. These load average numbers basically measure the active processes and display an average with which you can gauge how high your system load (processes) is and has been.

Here is a direct explanation from one of the sites below...

Server Load Explination
The load average tries to measure the number of active processes at any time. As a measure of CPU utilization, the load average is simplistic, poorly defined, but far from useless. High load averages usually mean that the system is being used heavily and the response time is correspondingly slow. What's high? ... Ideally, you'd like a load average under, say, 3, ... Ultimately, 'high' means high enough so that you don't need uptime to tell you that the system is overloaded.

More detailed info can be found at many sites including...
http://www.webhostgear.com/65_print.html
http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/ldavg1.shtml

 

[mkrishnan]

Mmm, according to the man page:

The uptime utility displays the current time, the length of time the system has been up, the number of users, and the load average of the system over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

The load average is the number of processes waiting for CPU time at any given instant. So if more than one process is waiting at a given instant for CPU time (on a single processor computer) then they have to wait in line. If the number is ?1, then, on average, processes were not waiting in line very often.

This is actually a lot more meaningful for a server or another back-office computer where tasks are running steadily. If your number is 0.5, that doesn't mean that if you try to run a PS action, surf a website, and run iSync at the same time, that CPU availability will not become a bottleneck.... But on a server, if the number is <<1 then it means that you are not making efficient usage of the server (it could do more things for you), and if it is >>1 then the server is a process bottleneck. Replace 1 with the number of processors or cores, if that number is >1.

Does that make any sense?