linux bound shell,Linux Load Average

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Linux Load Average

Not Your Average Average1Dr. Neil J. Gunther

Performance Dynamics Company SM

Castro Valley, California, USA

www.perfdynamics.com

Originally presented Sep 4, 2002

Updated by NJG Feb 21, 2003

In order to view the mathematical notations correctly, check here before continuing.

What's This Talk About?Averages are important for performance analysis and capacity planning. There are many manifestations of averages e.g., arithmetic average (the usual one), moving average (used in financial forecasting), geometric average (used in the SPEC benchmarks), harmonic average (not used enough), and so on.

Other averages are taken over time i.e., time-dependent averages. A particular example of such a time-dependent average is the load average metric that appears in certain UNIX (and therefore Linux) commands. Have you ever wondered how those three little numbers are produced?

In this presentation, I shall start at the surface (the shell) and gradually submerge into the depths of the Linux kernel to find out how the Linux load average gets calculated.

Finally, I'll compare the load average with other averaging techniques used in performance analysis and capacity planning.

What is the Load Average?Appears in the ASCII output of certain UNIX commands ...

[pax:~]% uptime

9:40am up 9 days, 10:36, 4 users, load average: 0.02, 0.01, 0.00

And on Linux systems ...

[pax:~]% procinfo

Linux 2.0.36 (root@pax) (gcc 2.7.2.3) #1 Wed Jul 25 21:40:16 EST 2001 [pax]

Memory: Total Used Free Shared Buffers Cached

Mem: 95564 90252 5312 31412 33104 26412

Swap: 68508 0 68508

Bootup: Sun Jul 21 15:21:15 2002 Load average: 0.15 0.03 0.01 2/58 8557

...

Three numbers: 1-, 5-, and 15-, minute averages of .... ?

How the Guru's Define LOAD ...Man Pages (oops!)

[pax:~]% man "load average"

No manual entry for load average

Tim O'Reilly and Crew, p.726 The load average tries to measure the number of active processes at any time. As a measure of CPU utilization, the load average is simplistic, poorly defined, but far from useless.

Adrian Cockcroft, p.229

The load average is the sum of the run queue length and the number of jobs currently running on the CPUs. In Solaris 2.0 and 2.2 the load average did not include the running jobs but this bug was fixed in Solaris 2.3.

Graphical Display of Load AverageCan be displayed as a time series like that produced by ORCA.

What is an ``Average'' Load?Tim O'Reilly and Crew What's high? ... Ideally, you'd like a load average under, say, 3, ... Ultimately, 'high' means high enough so that you don't need uptime to tell you that the system is overloaded.

... different systems will behave differently under the same load average. ... running a single cpu-bound background job .... can bring response to a crawl even though the load avg remains quite low.

Blair Zajac (ORCA Author)

If long term trends indicate increasing figures, more or faster CPUs will eventually be necessary unless load can be displaced. For ideal utilization of your CPU, the maximum value here should be equal to the number of CPUs in the box.

Some hedging because the load average is not your average kind of average. It's a time-dependent average ... a damped time-dependent average.

But you're a Linux expert and you knew this already. Right?

Let's find out ...

``The LA Triplets'' Quiz

Random Samples

In each of these samples:

A. load average: 6.85, 7.37, 7.83

B. load average: 8.50, 10.93, 8.61

C. load average: 37.34, 9.47, 3.30

is the load:

Increasing

Decreasing

Stationary

Can't decide

Sequential Samples

Here are some load averages monitored in sequence by sampling them over a 5 hour period (e.g., using the uptime command) at each of the times shown in the left-most column.

8:00am load average: 1.21 0.81 0.13

8:10am load average: 37.34 9.47 3.30

8:50am load average: 19.21 16.02 7.40

9:15am load average: 13.92 15.13 8.18

9:40am load average: 10.51 13.50 8.47

10:30am load average: 8.50 10.93 8.61

11:00am load average: 8.15 9.84 8.55

11:20am load average: 7.72 9.20 8.44

1:00pm load average: 6.85 7.37 7.83

Imagine a sysadm running the uptime command at those wall-clock times.

In which LA sample does maximum load occur?

LA sample taken at 9:15am

LA sample taken at 8:50am

LA sample taken at 11:00am

LA sample taken at 10:30am

Excluding the first LA sample at 8am, in which sample does least load occur?:

LA sample taken at 8:10am

LA sample taken at 11:20am

LA sample taken at 1:00pm

Visual Hints

Numeric triples are convenient for computers but hard on sysam's.

The following diagram shows the 10-minute load averages above graphically.

The 3 dots correspond to the 3 numeric LA values. The y-axis shows the load values and the x-axis shows a range of time between 1 and 15 minutes. The left-most point represents the 1-minute load average, the middle point represents the 5-minute load average and the right-most the 15-minute load average.

Here is an animation of the above sequence.

End of Quiz

Simple ExperimentTwo hot-loops initiated in background on single-CPU Linux box. Two phases in the test over the course of 1 hour:

CPU pegged for 2100 seconds then processes killed.

CPU quiescent for the remaining 1500 seconds.

Perl script sampled load average every 5 minutes using uptime

Experimental Results 2

1-minute LA reaches a value of 2.0 after 300 seconds into the test

5-minute LA reaches 2.0 around 1200 seconds

15-minute LA would reach 2.0 at 4500 seconds (but processes killed at 2100 seconds)

(Resembles the charging/discharging of an RC circuit)

Into the Depths ...

http://lxr.linux.no/source/kernel/...

unsigned long avenrun[3];

624

625 static inline void calc_load(unsigned long ticks)

626 {

627 unsigned long active_tasks; /* fixed-point */

628 static int count = LOAD_FREQ;

629

630 count -= ticks;

631 if (count < 0) {

632 count += LOAD_FREQ;

633 active_tasks = count_active_tasks();

634 CALC_LOAD(avenrun[0], EXP_1, active_tasks);

635 CALC_LOAD(avenrun[1], EXP_5, active_tasks);

636 CALC_LOAD(avenrun[2], EXP_15, active_tasks);

637 }

638 }

The sampling interval of LOAD_FREQ is once every 5 HZ. How often is that?

LA Sampling IntervalRecall that:

1 HZ = 100 ticks

5 HZ = 500 ticks

Therefore:

1 tick = 10 milliseconds

500 ticks = 5000 milliseconds (or 5 seconds)

So 5 HZ means that CALC_LOAD is called every 5 seconds.

Don't confuse this period with the reporting periods {1-, 5-, 15-} minutes.

LA CalculationsCALC_LOAD is a C macro defined in this code fragment:

58 extern unsigned long avenrun[ ]; /* Load averages */

60 #define FSHIFT 11 /* nr of bits of precision */

61 #define FIXED_1 (1<

62 #define LOAD_FREQ (5*HZ) /* 5 sec intervals */

63 #define EXP_1 1884 /* 1/exp(5sec/1min) as fixed-point */

64 #define EXP_5 2014 /* 1/exp(5sec/5min) */

65 #define EXP_15 2037 /* 1/exp(5sec/15min) */

67 #define CALC_LOAD(load,exp,n) \

68 load *= exp; \

69 load += n*(FIXED_1-exp); \

70 load >>= FSHIFT;

There are two points of interest here:

What does CALC_LOAD actually do?

What are the magic numbers: 1884, 2014, 2037?

Fixed Point FactorsUse 1-minute sampling as example. Conversion of exp(5/60) into base-2 with 11 bits of precision can be calculated as: e5 / 60 ?

e5 / 60

211But EXP_R represents the inverse function exp( - 5/60R).

Calculate magic numbers directly from the formula:

EXP_R =

211

2[(5 log2(e))/ 60R]where R = {1-, 5-, 15-} minute reporting periods.

Magic NumbersMagic numbers for 5-second sampling rate. R

EXP_R

Rnd

1884.25

1884

2014.15

2014

2036.65

2037which agree with the kernel comments ...

63 #define EXP_1 1884 /* 1/exp(5sec/1min) */

64 #define EXP_5 2014 /* 1/exp(5sec/5min) */

65 #define EXP_15 2037 /* 1/exp(5sec/15min) */

If the sampling rate was decreased to 2 second intervals...

EXP_R

Rnd

1980.86

1981

2034.39

2034

2043.45

2043

What does CALC_LOAD do?Consider the 1-minute CALC_LOAD function:

67 #define CALC_LOAD(load,exp,n) \

68 load *= exp; \

69 load += n*(FIXED_1-exp); \

It's the fixed-point arithmetic version of: load(t) = load(t-1) e-5/60R + n(t) (1 - e-5/60R)

(1)where n(t) is number of active processes.

Special Case: n(t) = 0Subsituting into eqn.(1) ... load(t) = load(t-1) e-5t/60R

(2)

Eqn.(2) represents exponential decay of the type we saw in the experiments after 2100 seconds.

Special Case: n(t) = 2

Here, the second term dominates in eqn.(2): load(t) = 2 load(t-1) (1 - e-5t/60R)

(3)

Eqn.(3) is monotonically increasing. Decay constant tRC_1 = 1 minute. Rise Time ? 5 tRC_1 = 5 minutes (300 seconds).

Exponential Smoothing/Filtering

A general purpose way for prepping highly variable data.

Available in tools like EXCEL, R/S+, Mathematica.

General form of smoothed data is:

Y(t)

smoothed

= Y(t-1) +

damping

鼢r>덼/font>

X(t)

raw

- Y(t-1)

??ont>

(4)

By comparison the LA form is:

load(t) = load(t-1) + EXP_R [ n(t) - load(t-1) ]

(5)Eqn.(5) is equivalent to (4) if EXP_R = 1 - a.

Relation to Other Averages

So, EXP_R plays the role of a damping factor in the UNIX LA.

Moving Average (MA) ? Arithmetic average with lag-k (see shortly).

Load Average(LA) ? Exponentially-damped MA (Exp-MA)

EXP_R

aR (damping)

1 - aR

EXP_1

0.0800 ( ? 8%)

0.9200

EXP_5

0.0165 ( ? 2%)

0.9835

EXP_15

0.0055 ( ? 1%)

0.9945where a = 1 - exp(-5/60R).

Steady-State Averages

Look at load over a long time (t ? ?) and break the time series into set of columns.

Dt ? column width

Q(Dt) x Dt ? sub-area

弯font >Q(Dt) x Dt ? total area

The time-averaged queue length: [(弯font >Q(Dt) x Dt)/ T] ? QModel of Run-Queue

Steady-state averages:

N: running processes

Z: sleeping processes

X: thoughput

D: CPU service time (in Ticks)

R: total execution time

- S (Response time)

X R (Little?s law)

This is the kind of model I used in my previous LUV talk (July 11,2000) in which I analyzed the average performance metrics associated with a fair-share scheduler.

The same kind of averages are used in my performance analyzer tool called Pretty Damn Quick.

Hyper-growth Website Planning

The problem:

What is the growth rate?

Forecast back-end capacity requirements

Published in: Performance Engineering: State of the Art and Current Trends, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2001.

The General Approach

Sample time series data

Apply MA (or Exp-MA) to remove variance effects

Forecast using nonlinear regression

Scalability projections (See Refs. 1 & 2)

Sample Time Series

Total CPU utlilization on back-end server (E10K).

Data was collected using SE Toolkit/Percolator. Similar to OCRAlator.

Apply Moving Averages

Projected Growth Rate

Doubling time ? 6 months!

Week 20 was Y2K.

Quiz Solutions

Here are the solutions to the quiz given earlier.

Time Series This is the original time series during the 300 minutes in which the samples were collected.

Load Averages A plot of the load averages over 300 minutes.

An Easier Way?

Just reverse the time axis. As described in the Visual Hints section of the quiz, the 3 dots correspond to the 3 numeric LA values and the y-axis shows the load values. But here, the x-axis shows a range of time between -15 and 0 minutes. The left-most point now represents the 15-minute load average, the middle point represents the 5-minute load average and the right-most the 1-minute load average. This representation more closely represents the trend in time.