[aklug] Re: Reasonable average server load?

Royce Williams wrote:
> Arthur Corliss said the following, on 6/23/2010 11:24 AM:
>
>> On Wed, 23 Jun 2010, Christopher Howard wrote:
>>
>
>
>> System load is a good basic indicator and should ideally not get over 1.0,
>> since that means you have processes in the run queue that are ready to run,
>> but are blocking.
>>
>
> Two caveats:
>
> 1. Multiple processors or cores can yield different non-blocking loads.
>
> For example, on some OSes, pegging four CPUs using only four processes
> will yield a load of 4.0 on some OSes (with nothing blocking).
>
> 2. If this is a virtualized environment, the activity visible to you
> (even as root) may only represent a small fraction of the actual
> processes and I/O running on the system.
>
Especially if the Virtualization Host you're on is making silly
decisions (like loading your working RAM into it's swap - I've seen it
happen) , or if your server's filesystem is on an high-latency platform
(example: saturated NFS mount or busy filesystem.)

Your load will be high, your server will be extremely slow, but there
won't be 'anything' (even with a vmstat, and iostat, a sar, or a 'top')
that leads you to believe there's a problem. It'll just be pokey.

Adam

-- 
Adam
---------
To unsubscribe, send email to <aklug-request@aklug.org>
with 'unsubscribe' in the message body.