Load field value on the utility TOP

[Dick Hall]

We have a dual processor HP9000-K and are doing some load testing.

I am using TOP to watch the performance of the machine however I am not sure
how about the load figure in the app.

Am I looking at, if it says 0.39, 39% load on the machine ?? and if this is
true, then with dual processors would the highest number be 2.00 and if I had
three processors 3.00 or 300% ??

Just trying to figure out if we are maxing the machine out.

Thanks for any and all help
Dick Hall

[Paul Hite_2]

In a single cpu environment, load is easy to uderstand. 100 times a second the
system scans the process table. It counts any running process, any process
waiting to run, and any process not currently runnable but waiting for disk i/o
to complete. This value, nrun, is an integer. The array avenrun the average
value of nrun over the past minute, the past 5 minutes, and the past 15
minutes. These are the load averages displayed on the second line of top.

But then we have the load averages broken out by cpu. It's not clear to me how
a runnable process get counted to a particular cpu. Maybe runnable processes
are distributed over all cpus. Or maybe its the last cpu that the process ran
in.

We start to raise an eyebrow if the load goes above 3. If the load goes above
6 we actually look at the box and possibly do something.