Monday 17 September 2007

Understanding Load Average

Please take a look for details:
http://www.teamquest.com/resources/gunther/display/5/index.htm


Summary

So, what have we learned? Those three innocuous looking numbers in the LA triplet have a surprising amount of depth behind them.

The triplet is intended to provide you with some kind of information about how much work has been done on the system in the recent past (1 minute), the past (5 minutes) and the distant past (15 minutes).

As you will have discovered if you tried the LA Triplets quiz, there are problems:

1. The "load" is not the utilization but the total queue length.
2. They are point samples of three different time series.
3. They are exponentially-damped moving averages.
4. They are in the wrong order to represent trend information.

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