6 ms·
When the Unix load average was added to Unix
- schoen 11y agoI'm one week older than the Unix load average! Or perhaps: my reported uptime is guaranteed to be longer than any Unix system's. :-)
- wobbleblob 11y agoReally, you have never been rebooted?
- piyushpr134 11y agono. he just sleeps :)
- nekkoru 11y agoBarring some kind of medical emergency requiring CPR, it's safe to say quite a lot of people have never been rebooted.
- rusbus 11y agoGiven how hard it is to determine what is actually causing high load sometimes I'm surprised we haven't evolved more easily actionable metrics.
- mjevans 11y agoYou mean like per process time spent active on a CPU? You could poll that ever so often and log the results to a database if you actually cared; but the act of measuring changes the results...
- dmit 11y agoOr as Bryan Cantrill put it: When you're in top, what's the top process? top! "Hey man, good news, I've found the problem! I'm the problem!! Who would've thought that?! Don't run me!"
- plorkyeran 11y agotaskman.exe is the one exception to this that I've seen, which I've wondered about ever since I switched over to non-Windows platforms. Is there something about NT that makes performance metrics unusually cheap, or is it just "lying" and not reporting that time anywhere?
- jrapdx3 11y agoThat's curious. Running Win8.1 and Task Manager lists Task Manager with subprocess Task Manager, anyway, using variably 0 to ~1.0% CPU, 0.3% memory. How "truthful" these stats are, well I guess that's another question altogether...
- jandrese 11y agoTaskman sorts differently. Top sorts by the most recent active process, while taskman sorts by the process that has used the most CPU on average lately.
- johnmaguire2013 11y agoYou can choose what to sort by in both.
- rusbus 11y agoI mean finding the actual cause of a high load number. There's no way to break it down by process, or even find out if it's because of IO or network, etc. without using other tools.
- feld 11y agoAnd don't forget that load average means something different between each OS
- sciurus 11y agoAlso of interest is "Understanding the (original) meaning of Unix load average" https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/LoadAverageMeaning https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/LoadAverageMea...
- dws 11y agoIf memory serves, the load average calculation was the only use of floating point in the BSD 4.2 kernel. Reworking the algorithm to get 4.2 running on the National 32016 before the floating point co-processor was available was my first time inside the kernel. Fun times.