Experiments to check the background load averages. Kernel: Ubuntu 3.2.0-29. WWW.Smythies.com

The Reported Load Averages experiments and tests of these web pages are based on the assumption that (on my servers, at least) the background loads (from cron jobs and such) are close enough to 0 to ignore.

This web page provides the details for what the background load "really" are. ("really" in quotes because it is not clear what is to be trusted.)

This particular page is for the Ubuntu Kernel 3.2.0-29, which includes the official fixes for the incorrect reported load averages issues. The data was acquired from a fresh boot, system idle for the entire test. This test is just a check, and the results shouldn't be different than the previous kernel with the manually applied patch.



That the 15 minute reported load average never goes below 0.05 is a finite number of bits math issue. Otherwise they seem to spike up about 0.1 every so often. Note that is this experiment there are 15 minute load averages below 0.05 merely because it was a fresh boot and it had not gone above 0.05 yet. Once it does, it will never go below 0.05 again.

A historgram of the data:



The following notes will not make any sense to anyone but me

The reported load average data is acquired in the usual way with the load_ave script.. Then saved and parsed and converted to matk compatible format for graphing:

./load_ave
... a great deal of time goes by. In this case 5 days 20 hours 38 minutes and 40 seconds. The script is terminated.
cp ave_data ave_data_idle_3.2.0.29
../c/getdata "load average: " ave_data_idle_3.2.0.29 z1
../c/getdata "," z1 z2
../c/getdata "," z2 z3
../c/icifix z3 >idle.txt

The file idle.txt is copied over to a windows computer and plotted with my incredibly old matk program under a DOSBox environment.
Use desmet/histo1 to make the histogram data.