[Gllug] Biitorrent for a dummy

[Jan Kokoska]

In my experience, on 2.4 kernels an average load of 20 with some
relatively light-weight processes such as mysql db was relatively fine
(300 queries per second).. in case of apache reaching the above
mentioned load of 60-80, the machines were pretty much dead (this was
the point to kill -9 and pray)... dual Xeons, the usual makes.
Preemption patches and 2.6 (with integrated preemption, greater
default scheduling frequency 100->1000 Hz and adaptive schedulers)
have undoubtedly improved it, but to which extent, I wouldn't know
precisely, since I don't work with so heavily loaded machines anymore.

It matters much *what* is creating this load, I would still feel
pretty safe about a mailserver running qmail for instance, with that
load (have seen it before, though it was not my machine to take care
of).

Jan

On Sun, 23 Jan 2005 23:00:13 +0000, Tethys <tet at createservices.com> wrote:
> 
> "Martin A. Brooks" writes:
> 
> >That's not heavily loaded.  The front end web servers for The Guardian
> >routinely have load averages of 70-80.  Elsewhere, one server I ran
> >would get up to a load of 300 or more during peak times.
> 
> That's nothing to be proud of. It's a sign that they're not performing
> proper capacity planning. Either that or they're using Solaris, which
> has a bug in its load average calculations, which causes it to report
> unrealistically high load averages in some circumstances. One of our
> mailservers once hit a claimed load average of over 8000 -- yes, it
> was responding very slowly, but not as slowly as a box with a load
> average of 8000 should (i.e., essentially nto at all).
> 
> For comparison, we have a fairly busy site (handling about a third as
> much traffic as the Guardian acording to Alexa), and our load average
> rarely goes above 2 or 3, and then that's mostly due to decisions made
> that I can do nothng about (the choice to use servlets, for example).
> 
> Tet
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