Re: /proc/loadavg disagrees with top and ps

[Edvard Majakari <edvard.majakari@staselog.com>]

Reid Priedhorsky <reid@reidster.net> writes:

> /proc/loadavg currently reports the following:
>
>   0.96 0.98 0.78 1/116 23994
>
> xload also reports roughly the same.
>
> But top and ps both report a nearly idle system (98% idle). What is going
> on? How can I find out what is causing my system to be so busy?

Umm.. your system doesn't seem busy to me. IIRC, those load averages represent
the average number of processes waiting to be served for 1, 5 and 15
minutes. Thus load averages of 3.5, 2.3 and 0.97 would indicate heavy
increase in load during the last 15 minutes, and that at the moment 3.5
processes in average wait for the kernel scheduler to give them some
processing time.

As such, load averages below 1 mean system doesn't have any processes
(except perhaps the one being run) waiting to be served.

-- 
# Edvard Majakari		Software Engineer
# PGP PUBLIC KEY available    	Soli Deo Gloria!

$_ = '456476617264204d616a616b6172692c20612043687269737469616e20'; print
join('',map{chr hex}(split/(\w{2})/)),uc substr(crypt(60281449,'es'),2,4),"\n";