how do you calculate load

[jimbojames5645]

I have been using top for sometime, and I understand that the higher the load average, the more the box is doing, however i have never learned how the load average is actually calculated.

 

[thedaver]

It's a black box of sorts, but essentially it monitors the following:

Open file handles (inodes), disk access load, RAM swapping, jobs open, CPU scheduler queue, etc.

It's an amalgum of measurements on the system - mainly CPU related - and measures of how the kernel is responding to load.

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