What do the load-values mean?

Nagios
1

I have two questions:

  1. What do the loadvalues from mutliple check-plugins theoretically mean (the three numbers)?
  2. How do i interprete them?

I know, that all three values show up different timeperiods. But how do i know, which warning/critical-value ist good?

So, what does a value of 4 or 5 really mean to the system?

Greetings, Qeldroma

2

If i remeber correctly load values are the number of average process waiting to use the CPU in the specified timeperiod.

So it’s relkated to the number of CPUs in the system… if on the 15 minutes period it’s always higher than the CPU number your system is overloaded…

Luca

3

Oh, don’T think so, because our MySQL-server with a single CPU is nearby idle as long as processes are under 3…
SO i don’t think, that there’s a direkt relation to the amount of CPUs?

4

you sure it’s idle and not hanging around waiting for some I/O interrupt?

Luca

5

A good explanation of those 3 numbers is here:
teamquest.com/resources/gunther/ldavg1.shtml

6

I thought it was the time that a process waits on average to for a free cpu cycle?