[ Chris Csanady writes about load average ]

Matthew Green writes:

>load average isn't the percentage of cpu used.  use something like
>vmstat or top to look for that.  load average is "the average number
>of processes in a runable state" based over some period of time.
>chris fixed the load average calculation some time ago -- which made
>it "seem" higher  :-)

	In 1.0 I had noticed that my machine, completely idle, running
nothing but an XServer and a very large xload (so that it would display
a couple hours of history) would, if left alone, eventually accumulate a
very funny looking load average: it would be at a solid "1" for 15 minutes
(roughly), then near "0" for 15 minutes, then solid "1" for 15 minutes, etc,
etc, ad infinitum .. with no other processes of importance running. The 
silence was also punctuated by a small spiky sawtooth once every five
minutes, which I didn't understand either. (I wasn't running cron, inetd,
or in fact anything other than a single-user shell and an XServer for one
particular test.)

	When Chris's changes came out, suddenly the machine reported being
quite quiescent when it was supposed to be .. :)

Cheers,
Phil
--
Phillip F Knaack
Tech Junkie / Junk Techie / Mr ScreenSaver Man