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To me, a load of 2.00 would mean that it's '''over'''loaded by 100%, not 200%.
{{unsigned|Vmardian|13:25, 21 November 2006}}
The author did OK until they said "For example a load average of "3.73 7.98 0.50" on a single CPU system can be interpreted as:
the CPU was overloaded by 373% (needed to do 373% as much work as it can do in a minute) during the last minute."
This is NOT correct. (which is why I deleted that section previously, but it re-appeared).
As the author correctly stated earlier, load is how many processes is waiting to run (+ 1 actually running) on the system. e.g if there are 9 waiting and 1 running the load will be 10.
As only one process can run at a time on a single core processor (obviously multi-processor or multi-cores will be better), the others have to wait dependant on a multitude of factors from what the process is, to the nice (priority) value etc,
But let's take a simple example, ignoring the overhead as the CPU switches tasks.
You have 10 small, identical programs running on a single core CPU. They only take 5% CPU when they run as they are not CPU intensive, but they are designed to run for 1 second. Only 1 can run at a time (it's a single CPU, single core, remember) - so what is the CPU usuage (%) and the load ?
CPU utilization is 5% because only one can run at a time but the load is 10.
Don't forget multi-tasking is an illusion of programs running concurrently. They only get a share and are switched to other waiting tasks.
I was going to suggest trying a low-load device like a sound player, but when I started the second xmms playing and played a mp3, the load dropped from 0.41 to 0.0 on my amd64 4000+ notebook running pclinuxos 2.6.16.27.tex1 #1 Thu Aug 10 20:13:42 CDT 2006 i686 Mobile AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+ unknown GNU/Linux
So it looks like top or something else is broken. XMMS playing a MP3 takes 1.5% CPU but as there are 143 tasks with x and kde running, something is seriously wrong.
Anyway, I hope you get the idea.
I was going to
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