Decreasing the Load

[prasadb]

my one of the server is showing load between 7-8 by top command. please let me how can i reduce it ?

[HGN]

Hi

From top you can determine what is taking up the load on the CPU's then you can determine if anyone of them can be terminated. Load of 7-8 cannot be bad unless you see performance issues.

You can browse/search the itrc forum site for any thread for cpu load, I have one below

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1074698


Rgds

HGN

[prasadb]

Thanks HGN.

i would like to know how much load can a HP UX server could have without degrading the performance..

Thanx in advance

[Andres_13]

That is a very difficult question to answer to because there are a big number of vars that can affect performance.

Not sure if there is a limit but in my prod servers i have rates between 1.7 - 1.8.

Regards!

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

The "load" reported by uptime or top is very, very misleading. It represents the number of processes running or ready-to-run during the measurement period. There is no correct load and the actual number is meaningless unless you also state the number of processors in your computer. A load of 7-8 is nothing for a 32 processor computer. On the other hand, 7-8 on a 1-processor system needs to be investigated. Note that I did not say it was bad, just needs to be understood.

First, the world's smallest compute-intensive script:

while :
do
:
done

Now run this and you will consume 100% CPU while it runs (forever until you kill it). Run 10 copies of this script and your load will be 10, even if you only have 1 processor. The amazing part is that with a load of 10 from this script, everyone can edit their files and login, etc with no visible effect on interactive performance. That's the beauty of timeslicing and priority handling. These compute-intensive processes drop to the bottom of the priority chain to allow I/O and other processes to continue.

The load is unimportant unless users are complaining -- but that assumes that things were much faster before the load increased. The two ways to reduce the load is to increase the number of CPUs in your computer, or terminate processes that consume a lot of CPU time (I do NOT recommend the second choice as you will break things...)