Comment 93 for bug 985661

Revision history for this message
sds (sds-gnu) wrote :

When the computer is "idle", load should be 0. This is the source of its usefulness.
I.e., non-0 loadavg means that
either the comp is thrashing,
or backup is running,
or R is partitioning a graph,
or emacs is being compiled
or a file db is being rebuilt
or ....
"normal" ui operation (editing a file, browsing the web &c) should not affect loadavg.
this is precisely the usefulness of loadavg: it tells me that the computer is busy,
and, unless I know it is busy because I told it to do something,
I should investigate: maybe a virus is trying to break into the NSA :-)
right now my loadavg is at 1.3 while only one single-threaded computation is running.
This is wrong.

It would be nice if there were a tool which would tell me that the loadavg consists of.
e.g.: loadavg=4.2 = 1 from R + 1.5 from Matlab + 1.0 from gcc + 0.7 from a no-longer-available NFS-mounted FS.
it is alleged that "atop" is supposed to be able to do that,
but even its adepts have not been able to produce such a split reliably.