RE: CPU - load !

The 3 numbers are the average number of processes in the "run queue" over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes. For a process to be in the queue, it must be ready to run, but not actually on the CPU. If the system is swapping lots, that means that the io wait time will be high. If I remember correctly, if a process is waiting for swap, it is not counted as "ready to run", but I don't know if Solaris counts the page daemon as a process for the purpose of determining load average.

Also, depending on the version of top, it may be confused between regular processes and LWPs (threads). For example, if you have lots of short-lived threads ready to run within a single process, you can have a very high load average (I have seen ~200) while the system remains responsive. `

0.5 is not a high number, but then again, load average isn't such a useful metric. If Solaris performance is a problem, I strongly recommend getting a copy of Adrian Cockroft's book on the subject, and using vmstat and iostat to see what is really going on.

HTH, g

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 8:56 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Can anybody explain to me what the "average load" figures you can get vith
the top - command really means.

Someone is telling me that our Sun Solaris Server, running a suncluster with
two database instances where we have Oracles emailserver and Oracles ldapserver combined with Oracles Unified messaging, having problems with the
CPU-load and that the system is constantly doing a lot of swaping.

The average load is around 0.5.

The CPU is idle most of the times (95 %). Of cours this is going up and down
but for the most of the times the CPU is idle.

The application running on is a webapplication so there is two webservers
talking to this database-server with a jdbc - connection.

There are for the moment not so many people using the site but when we run
our application we have no problems with performance.

But back to the average load.

Is it a high number? Is there anything else you are supposed to look at?

Any suggestions or ideas would be more than welcome.

Anders Bengtsson

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