Roman Shaposhnik's

Now, before you can answer this fundamental questions, lets take care of some basics first. Do you really know what does "load average" (as reported by getloadavg() or by various utilities such as uptime and w) really tell you? Or even what does it actually mean? Out of 10 random folks informally surveyed in the hallways of Sun Quentin:

1. 2 said "Duh?"
2. 7 said "Load average measures an average number of processes over 1 minute; 5 minutes and 15 minutes respectively"
3. 1 said "Load average numbers represent a simple moving average of the number of process in a scheduler's run queue with a window of 1 minute, 5 minutes and 15 minutes respectively

Now, unless your name is Neil Gunther something is telling me you'd be among one of these folks yourself. I certainly used to be. That is, before I came across a series of articles by Dr. Gunther. The rest chronicles my personal journey of realizing just how deep the rabbit hole goes.[Read More]