← Back to events
ActiveTech

Some (mostly historical) issues with the Unix load average

What happened

In the beginning ( in 3BSD ), the Unix load average was simple, or at least it was conceptually simple . However, this was in a much simpler Unix environment with single-CPU machines and no such thing as 'threading'. Much like how the simple idea of 'iowait' has challenges on multi-CPU machines , so does the simple version of load average. This led to a series of issues and decisions about what the load average was…

Summary assembled by rule from the sources below

Why it's spreading

Sources