I thought that load average 1.0 on my two core machine means that the CPU usage is at 50%. That's not quite right. And also, why does it say 1.0?

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2024-06-28 03:00:03

I thought that load average 1.0 on my two core machine means that the CPU usage is at 50%. That's not quite right. And also, why does it say 1.0?

The first number is the total number of seconds the system has been up. The second number is how much of that time the machine has spent idle, in seconds The second value may be greater than the overall system uptime on systems with multiple cores since it is a sum.

There will be a lot of output. We can grep for the open system call. But that will not really work since strace outputs everything to the standard error (stderr) stream. We can redirect the stderr to the standard output (stdout) stream with 2>&1.

So why do we need the uptime program if we can just read the contents of the file? The uptime output is nicely formatted for humans whereas the number of seconds is more useful for using in your own programs or scripts.

They are taken from the /proc/loadavg file. If you take another look at the strace output, you'll see that this file was also opened.