CPU states, low idle %
 

Hello all...

I'm using RHEL 3 on an AMD Opteron machine (2.5 +GHz, 1GB RAM). We're going to be conducting a few surveys on campus and expecting a HUGE number of http requests.

While testing the setup, sometimes, the CPU idle% as shown by top goes down to as low as 42%. The remaining CPU% went almost entirely to the nice value. However, the load average was 0.00.

We're running a cron job that monitors top every twenty minutes, and in three days of trial run, the lowest CPU idle% shown has been 42%, and thehighest load average 0.15.

What does this mean, is there any reason to worry about the system crashing in the middle of a survey if the idle% is too low?? If that happens, I may not get my recomendations for an MS!!

Thanks!

Load average and cpu% are not the same thing. I don't know the exact difference either, but I've noticed that load average get's higher when I write big blocks of data from one device to another (e.g. CD>HDD ) but doesn't increase that much when I convert an audio file to a different format using almost 100%cpu.