Amanda-Users

Re: system load

2007-07-31 19:53:21
Subject: Re: system load
From: Jon LaBadie <jon AT jgcomp DOT com>
To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2007 19:30:28 -0400
On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 02:13:09PM -0400, Brian Cuttler wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 01:36:49PM -0400, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
> > So, you have sendmail and lotus notes running on it. Does the other 
> > lotus notes server load balance with this one? Or do they serve 
> > different groups? Does it spawn a mess of processes the way sendmail 
> > does? The load that is reported by uptime is the average number of jobs 
> > in the run queue over the last minute, five minutes and ten minutes. I 
> > think that means jobs that are just twiddling their thumbs waiting to 
> > get the cpu.
> 
> Good questions, let me try to answer each in turn.
> 
> The system is a LNotes server, the sendmail is incidental, low
> activity/background - this is not the smtp mailhub, that is another
> system completely.
> 
> We have completed dumps, though we have not yet completed taping. Current
> load average is under 10.
> 
>   1:46pm  up 23:40,  2 users,  load average: 9.61, 9.25, 9.14
> 
> No, I was wrong, there is still one dump in progress, big change
> from three though.
> 
> I'm uncertain how the load average is calculated, is it all runnable
> tasks, what counts as runable Solaris 9 (yes, that is the version),
> does it include blocked wait, sleeping, what ?

Skipping some details, a process is either sleeping (waiting for
some resource or event and thus not runable), runable but not
running (all resources and events satisfied but not yet in the
cpu), or running (in the cpu).  Load is the number of processes
that are running or runable, i.e. how many are using or could
use the cpu.

Note, if you have multiple cpus (or cores) an acceptable load
average is higher.  I.e. for a 4-cpu system, a load average of
4 would be similar to a load average of 1 for a uni-processor.

...
> > Have you tried running top? You can get it from sunfreeware.

If not installed, the similar /usr/bin/prstat is standard.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)

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