Interpreting output from the "top" command

[Stephen Burdeau]

I have a customer who is running performance tests on hp-ux with out product. The customer is complaining that the "load averages" hover around 4 for each of the 6 CPUs when running our product.

What is the meaning of the "load average" numbers? The information the customer gave me says this is "the average number of processes in the queue waiting for CPU time". Does this mean the average number of threads ready to run on a CPU (i.e., not blocked)? If so, how come the load averages are high, but each CPU shows about 80% idle? I don't understand why the load averages would be high if the CPU is mostly idle. Or maybe a load average of 4 per CPU is not really that high?

If anyone can shed any light, I would appreciate it. I have searched for documentation on the "top" command, but I only found the man page, which doesn't describe the meaning of the output much.

[Uday_S_Ankolekar · Accepted solution]

It may be a wrong information from top. There is a patch(PHKL_24551) available for 11i to solve this problem. It's a known issue. Check for latest release and try to install the patch.

-USA

[john korterman]

Hi,
please see Bill Hassel's answer in this thread:
http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=236945

and if the system is 11i, and the system is loaded even when doing nothing, then look also into the technical knowledge base for document id UCMDSKBRC00007173
, e.g. here for Europe:
http://www5.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/docDisplay.do?docLocale=en_US&admit=552267591+1073326490476+28353475&docId=200000062778255

regards,
John K.

[Hazem Mahmoud_3]

You will find top to be an inaccurate tool when it comes to multi-processor systems. If you have Glance on your system, that would be more accurate.

-Hazem