Hiya, just wondering something as have a dual (hyperthreaded) CPU setup. In top naturally shows as 4 virtual CPUS.

Basic question is in the load figures, for example on a single cpu system I would try and keep the load if possible below 1.

So on a dual/4 virtual cpu setup, whats roughly the equivalent of a decently equivalent system in terms of waiting processes (ie load), is it still a load of 1 no matter how many CPUs you have, or is a load of 2 ok (ie matches number of CPUS), as there's now 2 CPUs to take in processes twice as often if that makes sense?

TIA, just want to get a decent idea of the equivalent mark to keep load under.

hello muman

this is a cut and paste of my system

top - 15:58:39 up 3 days, 11:52, 1 user, load average: 3.28, 3.15, 2.89
Tasks: 107 total, 4 running, 103 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.9% user, 1.5% system, 74.9% nice, 22.7% idle
Mem: 1031992k total, 1017696k used, 14296k free, 306528k buffers
Swap: 200804k total, 4248k used, 196556k free, 201048k cached

Its a dual HT Xeon running three Folding@Home work units and this surfing right now.

work load has not been a factor untill all four cpus are at 100%

Each folding work unit takes about 100% .

The load consists of I/O wait as well as CPU ... so if you
had a busy database or web-server that has HD-I/O or
lots of network activity you'd still see a high load ...

One of our database machine's (dual-xeon) the load
is (despite SCSI-RAID) always above 3 ... :)


Cheers,
Tink

Hiya and thanks a lot for the replies. The main thing I guess is there's a couple of game servers on there which are more dependant on time factors in terms of response of processing and back to user maybe more than databases/webstuff, so I guess trying to find whats a good load without being overloaded if that makes sense.

Thanks again.