Re: [gentoo-user] Constant Load 1.00+ on new Toshiba laptop

[Matt Harrison]

Shawn Haggett wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 February 2009 16:24:45 Paul Hartman wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Beau Henderson <beau@××××××××××××.com>
>>
> wrote:
>
>>> G'day,
>>>
>>> I was wondering if anyone might have any idea's as to what is causing my
>>> new Toshiba A300 Satelite to idle at a load of 1.00 when not in use.
>>> Right after boot up it settles at 1.00 when I do nothing. I'm not seeing
>>> anything out of ordinary in dmesg ( asside from an non issue with legacy
>>> usb and sd and sr drivers in the kernel ).
>>>
>>> I had Ubuntu on this thing for a week or so as I needed something quick
>>> fast when my workstation chipfan died on me and this wasn't an issue when
>>> I had that installed so I think I can rule out hardware. Also, its not an
>>> issue when I boot up via live cd ( sysrescuecd ).
>>>
>>> I've tried different cpufreq governors ( default is ondemand ) and that
>>> doesn't appear to be an issue.
>>>
>>> Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.
>>>
>>> Thanks.
>>>
>> I've never known what those numbers represent (I know it is "load
>> average", but what it means, and what is the range, I have no idea)...
>> Anyway, it seems mine are always around 1+. It's not perfectly idle
>> but not running seti or anything intensive either.
>>
>
> I remember trying to google the meaning of those numbers once. It was VERY
> hard to find out what they were. It's something like, average number of
> processes in the running or ready to run states for the last 1, 5 & 15
> minutes.
>
> Shawn
>
>
googling "load average" brings me to 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing) which explains it somewhat.

HTH

Matt