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Full Discussion: Load Average
Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers Load Average Post 302093996 by Heathe_Kyle on Tuesday 24th of October 2006 10:20:25 AM
Old 10-24-2006
Load Average

Hello all, I have a question about load averages.

I've read the man pages for the uptime and w command for two or three different flavors of Unix (Red Hat, Tru64, Solaris). All of them agree that in the output of the 2 aforementioned commands, you are given the load average for the box, but none of the man pages is terribly clear on exactly what the load average is. The most helpful description I have found states that the load average is: "the number of jobs in the run queue for the last 5 seconds, the last 30 seconds, and the last 60 seconds". OK. Seems clear enough. The confusing part for me is that I don't understand how the number can be anything but an integer. When I run the command on a box, I get out like this:

load average: 6.37, 6.25, 6.57

The 6's I get... how can you have 6.37 jobs lined up for execution though? Would the partial jobs be threads or children processes of a parent job?

Furthermore, some boxes have a switch to get the output based on the Mach factor, where the Mach factor is simply described as being a "variant" of the load average. Then what exactly is the "Mach Factor"?

Thank you for your help.
 

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UPTIME(1)							   User Commands							 UPTIME(1)

NAME
uptime - Tell how long the system has been running. SYNOPSIS
uptime [options] DESCRIPTION
uptime gives a one line display of the following information. The current time, how long the system has been running, how many users are currently logged on, and the system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes. This is the same information contained in the header line displayed by w(1). System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptable state. A process in a runnable state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in uninterruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for disk. The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of CPUs in a system, so a load average of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time. OPTIONS
-p, --pretty show uptime in pretty format -h, --help display this help text -s, --since system up since, in yyyy-mm-dd HH:MM:SS format -V, --version display version information and exit FILES
/var/run/utmp information about who is currently logged on /proc process information AUTHORS
uptime was written by Larry Greenfield <greenfie@gauss.rutgers.edu> and Michael K. Johnson <johnsonm@sunsite.unc.edu> SEE ALSO
ps(1), top(1), utmp(5), w(1) REPORTING BUGS
Please send bug reports to <procps@freelists.org> procps-ng December 2012 UPTIME(1)
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