UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi there,

do someone have detailed information how to interpret the uptime command or rather which values can be called normal?
(i know what the information means, but i have no idea if these values are ok or to high:
3:02pm an 13:53, 2 Benutzer, Durchschnittslast: 10,06, 12,05, 13,00)

I hope that someone is in that topic and could tell me about it.

thanks

Hi,

what do you mean with normal ???? This output shows you the uptime of the system and the load. This information is mostly correct.

If you have a multi CPU system, the load display can be wrong, thats all.

Regards
malcom

My Problem is that i do not know how to interpret this values.
i know that they are standing for processes in the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes.
but are these the active processes or the processes in the queue?
For example there is a value 0.25 for the last 5 minutes.
how would you interpret this?

thanks

Hi,

0.25 means your system has a average load of 0.25 % in the last 5 minutes.

malcom

should this mean that a value of 15.97 show me a average load of 15.97%?
i can´t believe this because while the customers system displays me such a value the system had been very slow.
(like the load of 98% on a windows system)

daniel

The load average is not a percentage. It can be thought of as the number of processes waiting to run. So a load average of 0.25 means on average there is 1/4 of a process waiting to run, in other words most of the time none are waiting but a quarter of the time one is.

The 15.97 means on average there are about 16 processes waiting to run. If you have a medium to large multiprocessor box this might be ok. If it is a single processor box you'll have terrible performance.

It depends on what the processors are as well. I've had a 12 processor Sun box with 400 mhz Ultrasparc II processors start slowing down at a load average of 20, while a 4 processor box with Ultrasparc III 1.05ghz processors ran fine with a load average of 30. So a rule of thumb like "load average of 2x number of procs" won't help much, you need to compare to your system's historical behavior.