I’m just an ordinary average guy.

Load Average: those funny little numbers

I was going to write a little article on interpreting the load average in Unix and Linux machines, but I ran across this blog post and don’t think I could have said it better. Really, check it out.

When I’m logged into a graphical session on my FreeBSD system I use conky to monitor hardware utilization and performance (and the local weather and unread messages in my GMail inbox, etc.) But normally I work from the command line with ssh and tmux, so I have created an alias that I load in my login profile to let me get at the load average in a quick and easy fashion:

alias loads='sysctl vm.loadavg | cut -d" " -f3,4,5'

Now I just run loads any time I want to see how my cpu cores are doing.

Be seeing you.

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