Load average on server w/ 1 or 2 CPUs

[RikTytgat]

I have a Virtual Partition on a superdome nPar. When the OS runs with 1 active CPU, the load average is 4.4, and when it runs with 2 CPUs, the load average drops to 0.4 (activity on server does not change).

I would expect the load average on a 1 CPU server to be approximately the double of the load average on a 2 CPU server, since

"The load average is the average number of processes in the queue waiting for CPU time, over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes."

Why is this not the case?

Tnx,
Rik

[Alex Lavrov.]

My guess is, that because the processes are not all the same and it takes different time to run on CPU, you can't just divide the load on the CPU by 2. It depends on the processes at this moment.

[harry d brown jr]

It simply shows that you have processes that benefit from having multiple CPU's.

Do you have Glance/Measureware? If not, then you should purchase it and then you can really determine what is going on. uptime, sar. vmstat, iostat, ... are tools to get a glimpse of what's going on, ut with glance you can really dig into the issues.

live free or die
harry d brown jr

[RikTytgat]

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