[Gllug] Biitorrent for a dummy

[Nix]

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005, Tethys announced authoritatively:
> 
> "Martin A. Brooks" writes:
> 
>>A load average of 1 simply means that 1 process is always on the CPU.
> 
> Errr... no. It means that your box is too heavily loaded.

Errr... no.

>                                                           A load average
> of 0 is opitimal.

A load average of 0 means your machine is doing no work at all.

>                   A load average of 1 means that your CPU can't keep up
> with the amount of work being thrown at it.

A load average of 1 means that at least one job is waiting or running at
all times (it doesn't distinguish).

So a CPU-bound task like seti at home or climateprediction.net counts as 1;
but a task that's swapping like mad and getting no work done to
speak of *also* counts as 1.

>                                             Load is the number of jobs
> in the run queue -- that is, processes that are waiting for a timeslice
> (those is runnable state, not those sleeping, waiting on I/O etc.). They
> could be run were the CPU not busy doing other things.

They may *be* running. In fact, unless you're swapping or blocked in D
state in the kernel on something else, you *are* running.

(Formally, the run queue contains all schedulable processes: i.e., all
processes which are not asleep on a wait queue somewhere in the
kernel. Virtually every task is normally in this state.)

-- 
`Blish is clearly in love with language. Unfortunately,
 language dislikes him intensely.' --- Russ Allbery
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