from Hacker News

Really Understanding Linux CPU Load

by acl on 8/3/09, 5:43 PM with 3 comments

  • by spkthed on 8/3/09, 6:43 PM

    I wish I could upvote this more than once. Thanks for the submit! Crazy useful/interesting article!
  • by duskwuff on 8/4/09, 3:20 AM

    This really isn't a very good analogy. CPU load isn't a necessarily a measure of CPU contention - it's simply the average number of processes running or waiting for disk I/O at any time. The latter is increasingly often the issue at hand, and tends to affect load much more drastically than CPU-intensive tasks.
  • by rawr on 8/3/09, 9:09 PM

    I think that all articles should have a mandatory cars-on-a-bridge analogy.