On Fri, Mar 01, 2002 at 11:19:29AM -0600, Fabián Salamanca wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I'm using NetBSD 1.5.2 on a Celeron 333 MHz cpu  machine and i'm getting high cpu loads
> 
> 11:13AM  up 18:10, 1 user, load averages: 0.54, 0.32, 0.28
> USER             TTY      FROM              LOGIN@  IDLE WHAT
> fsalamanca       p0       128.251.183.38   11:13AM     - w               
> 
> im running only inetd and crond
> 
> then after 2 min the cpu load goes down to 0.07, but it goes up to 0.28 with only 2 or 3 ls commands
> 
> I configured my kernel with my own hardware and got no errors,
> 
> any idea whats causing so much load? ( I 've installed FreeBSD and Linux in the same machine with no problems )

There is no standart way of computing the load average, and each system
implements its own algorithm. It's only vaguely related to CPU usage:
you can have higth load average with only a few % of CPU used, for example
if processes are I/O bound.

So comparing the load average with what you see on other system isn't really
sensible.

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer@antioche.eu.org>
--