I'm wondering i always see my load average on my computer
1.76,1.31,1.08 at the moment. but what the hell does it mean ?
+2
A:
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.
When seeing the results of the load averages, they are for the past 1, 5, and 15 minute
u07ch
2009-04-30 07:43:09
+2
A:
The load indicates how man processes are waiting in the queue to be executed. You would have a load of 1 if your have that much processes that at least one process has always to queue up before it gets executed (is not executed immediately).
The numbers in uptime are average over some period.
Norbert Hartl
2009-04-30 07:49:09
Uptime averages generally run over 1, 5, and 15 minutes. The Mac OS 10.5 man page agrees.
dmckee
2009-04-30 13:51:48
+2
A:
If your CPU were a hot dog stand, the load averages would tell you the average number of people standing in line to get served. A load of less than 1.0 means that the hot dog vendor has some spare time between customers -- 1.0 means that, while a line never piles up, some customer is always talking to the vendor (who knows where all the hot dogs are going...). Having a "low" load average doesn't mean that your computer isn't doing anything though, there could be customers who take a really long time to eat their hot dog before getting in line again (that is to say some process might be waiting on the disk or network to wake them up with some data when it arrives), having a faster disk or net connection could improves your total dog sales.
Enjoy.
rndmcnlly
2009-04-30 08:00:26