On Thu, Feb 08, 2001 at 12:03:02PM -0800, wallshot wrote:

 > Actually, I believe that the NFS on 10Mbps is so bad that it might explain
 > the CPU load increases.  This is after about 15 mins of idle:

 ...

 > With 2-4 people logged in i've seen it climb to 1.00 with a few commands
 > idly typed in. My FreeBSD machine is a 233 Pentium and tends to have a
 > much easier time with far more processes open.

Load average is:

	Number of runnable processes + number of processes in short-term
	uninterruptible wait (e.g. waiting for disk or network I/O to
	fault in a page, etc.)

So, if you have a couple of people typing madly and causing I/O to
happen, you're going to have a higher load average, esp. if the I/O
takes a while (the Broadband Adapter only has 32K of RAM on it, so
it can't run at a very high rate of speed -- there's not a lot of
buffering).  They also chose a very crappy 10/100 Ethernet chip :-)

Anyway, on your FreeBSD Pentium example, there's a lot of idle processes;
they're not really contributing to load.

-- 
        -- Jason R. Thorpe <thorpej@zembu.com>