Re: Strange load average
Darac Marjal <mailinglist@darac.org.uk> writes:
> Probably not. It's probably just a rounding/display issue.
Rounding issues cannot explain the numbers. When the load average for
the last minute, sampled every 10s, is 0.00 a each sample, it cannot
be higher when averaged over a longer time.
> Remember that you're asking the system do do some work every ten
> seconds so, when it reads "0.00", it doesn't mean that it's
> absolutely zero, but rather that the load is less than 0.005.
The load caused by one call to sleep(1) and a uptime(1) every 10s is
next to nothing. Even with the xterm displaying the valuie every 10s
(to a remote X11 server), and some daemons in the background the load
average is much less than .005. BTW, on another server, with
Linux-2.4.37, much slower CPU (2 x Pentium III) and some more
background daemons, running emacs and gnus to write this posting, I
can run uptime every second and I get 0.00 for all 3 values (1 minute,
5 minutes, 15 minutes)
> This small load accumulates over the minutes so the 5 and 15 minute
> load averages are high enough to show.
The accumulated CPU time and other load is divided by longer time
intervals so it should still be 0.
> Try sleeping for 60 seconds between calls and see if that lowers
> things.
That doesn't change anything. I can also wait for an arbitrary long
time, type uptime, and it will show 0.00, 0.01, 0.05 almost every
time.
I still think this is a bug.
urs
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