[SunHELP] LOAD metric for uptime and top

[Jarrett Carver]

LOAD = The average number of jobs in the run queue.

On a 6 CPU system, a load of 1.2 means that over the last 1,5, or 15 minutes 
there was at least one job waiting to be run. On a 6 processor system your 
"high water" mark would be 12 (i.e 2 jobs waiting per processor).

CPU Utilization = The percent of time the CPU is in use.

On a multiprocessor system, vmstat and top combine the statistics gathered 
by the kernel. So 10% could be 5 processors at say 1% and one processor at 
70% and vmstat would diplay utilization at 12%.

My suggestion would be to use mpstat to see if one CPU is busier than all 
the others. Also check if you have any processor sets or if any process are 
bound to a particular CPU. This could cause a back-up in the form of a 
job-queue for one CPU, which could explain what you are seeing.


Jarrett Carver           http://www.geocities.com/solarboyz1
solarboyz1 at hotmail.com   Unix/NT Systems Administrator
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