Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 10 Nov 2000 17:42:02 -0800 | From | "H. Peter Anvin" <> | Subject | Re: sendmail fails to deliver mail with attachments in /var/spool/mqueue |
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Ralf Baechle wrote: > > On Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 02:18:20PM -0800, H. Peter Anvin wrote: > > > Numerically high load averages aren't inherently a bad thing. There > > isn't anything bad about a system with a loadavg of 20 if it does what > > it should in the time you'd expect. However, if your daemons start > > blocking because they assume this number means badness, than that is > > the problem, not the loadavg in itself. > > The problem seems to me that the load figure doesn't express what most > people seem to expect it to - CPU load. >
Actually, what most people expect it to represent is schedulability of new tasks. The problem is more one of:
a) Expecting a fixed relationship between the specific number and the behaviour of the machine; b) The long time constants.
On an 8-way machine a load average of 16 is not particularly high, even if you only count runnable processes, for example.
-hpa
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