From the course: Linux Tips

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Process management: System load

Process management: System load - Linux Tutorial

From the course: Linux Tips

Process management: System load

- [Instructor] Some commands like top, Htop, and Uptime show a System Load Indicator as a representation of how much processing a system is being asked to do. The System Load Indicator is composed of three numbers representing load averages over the past minute, five minutes, and 15 minutes. What each number represents is tied to the number of processor cores a system has. In each of these fields 1.00 represents one processor core working at full capacity. If the number drops below 1.00 per core, that means there's more processor time available than work that needs to be done. If it goes above one per core, that means that some tasks, that are being sent to the CPU, will have to wait for other tasks to be completed before they get processed. This is one place where setting the priority, or renicing a process, can control what processes will have the requests processed first. So, for example, a single core machine, like a little cloud server, would be doing just fine if the load…

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