Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Sun, 5 Nov 2000 07:55:40 -0500 (EST) | From | <> | Subject | Loadavg calculation |
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I'm working a project a work that is using Linux to run some very math-intensive calculations. One of the things we do is use the 1-minute loadavg to determine how busy the machine is and can we fire off another program to do more calculations. However, there's a problem with that.
Because it's a 1 minute load average, there's quite a bit of lag time from when 1 program finishes until the loadavg goes down below a threshold for our control mechanism to fire off another program.
Let me give an example (all on a 1-cpu PC)
HH:MM:SS 00:00:00 fire off 4 programs 00:01:00 loadavg goes up to 4 00:01:30 3 of the 4 programs finish loadavg still at 4 00:02:20 load avg goes down to 1, below our threshold 00:02:21 we fire off 3 more programs.
We'd like to reduce that almost 50 second lag time. Is it possible, in user-space, to duplicate the loadavg calculation period, say to a 15 second load average, using the information in /proc?
The other option we looked at, besides using loadavg, was using idle pct%, but if I read the source for top right, involves reading the entire process table to calculate clock ticks used and then figuring out how many weren't used.
Ideas, opinions welcome. Yes, I read the list, so either respond direct to me, or to the list.
bobyetman@att.net (Robert A. Yetman)
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