Re: Load averages reported by screen on HP-UX 11.11

[Paul Ackersviller]

On Thu, Jul 02, 2009 at 03:19:15PM -0700, Micah Cowan wrote:
> Paul Ackersviller wrote:
> > I've recently started displaying load averages in screen's harstatus line,
> > and notice something strange on one particular system.  The numbers are
> > approximately four times the ones shown by the HP-UX uptime program.
> > 
> > Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the box has four CPUs.  Could it be that
> > a division by cpu-count is being missed by screen on this OS?
> 
> On Unix systems I'm familiar with, the "uptime" command isn't _supposed_
> to normalize for number of CPUs; at least, my uptime's manpage says:
> "...so a load  average  of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the
> time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time."

That was only a wild guess, so I don't mind if it's wrong.  The HP-UX
man page for uptime has a lot less information than that, so it's hard
to say that screen's numbers are necessarily wrong.

> OTOH, screen appears to have seven different implementations for its
> GetLoadav function; it's entirely possible the wrong one was chosen for
> that build, or that the one that was chosen had some problems.

>From what I see in loadav.c, the one used on the system in question is
at the end, under the comment
 * The old fashion way: open kernel and read avenrun
Nothing there looks too unusual...