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Received: by minnie.vk1xwt.ampr.org with NNTP id AA6510 ; Sun, 10 Jan 93 11:19:07 EST Xref: sserve comp.unix.questions:30166 comp.unix.internals:5503 comp.unix.bsd:9848 Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!uunet!mcsun!sun4nl!tuegate.tue.nl!svin09!wsinis07!debra From: debra@wsinis07.info.win.tue.nl (Paul De Bra) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.unix.internals,comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: definition of avenrun Message-ID: <4965@svin09.info.win.tue.nl> Date: 12 Jan 93 16:25:49 GMT References: <1993Jan12.001127.25486@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> Sender: news@svin09.info.win.tue.nl Reply-To: debra@info.win.tue.nl Followup-To: comp.unix.questions Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands Lines: 24 In article <1993Jan12.001127.25486@jpl-devvax.jpl.nasa.gov> kaleb@swat (Kaleb Keithley) writes: >... >forward enough, but what seems to be lacking is a clear explanation of the >kernel variable "avenrun". (Actually, three variables -- on SunOS, three >"scaled integers", on others, three doubles.) > >This variable seems well enough known, as it's used in X11's xload too. I believe this variable contains the average number of jobs in the run queue, meaning the average number of jobs that are ready to run. (It's been a long time since i looked at the source, but i believe it is an array of 3 numbers, representing the average over 3 different time intervals, maybe something like the last 1, 5 and 20 minutes, but i'm not sure about these intervals.) One way to detect this meaning is to have a number, say 5, of small infinite loops running in parallel, and watch the numbers slowly increase up to 5. Just a sidenote: on System V release 4 there exists a similar array of numbers, of which one is used by xload, but the numbers represent the number of jobs that are waiting for something. If you have 5 infinite loops running in parallel the numbers remain 0, but if you have 5 'sleep 10000' processes in parallel the numbers slowly approach 5. Paul.