Re: [Savannah-hackers-public] Re: locate on sv.gnu.org?

[Karl Berry]

    'info nice' says that's an advisory to the scheduler, apparently
    without clear meaning.

My experience is that it helps a little, but not as much as one would
like.  Certainly can't hurt, though.

    ... assuming the load is a meaningful value to determine the server's
    activity, though. 

My experience is that it is more meaningful than often said, but
certainly not infallible.  Of course there are lots of other system load
gathering programs, like sa.

    I never really understood how that works.

My understanding is that it's the average length of the run queue, ie,
the number of processes that would like to run but don't have the cpu.

    Do you wish to look for such pattern in:
    /vservers/savannah/var/www/uptimes.txt

Well, just because it was easy, I tried to look for times when the load
average was less than one:

awk '$10 < 1 {print substr($1,0,2)}' \
  /vservers/savannah/var/www/uptimes.txt |sort | uniq -c | sort -nr 

The results (below) seem quite surprising, that the middle of the EST
afternoon is the quietest time.  But some greps indicate similar
numbers, so I guess it's right.  
  
So maybe set it up to run with nice -19 once a week at Sunday 13:30?  I
doubt that will impact anything too severely.  We can always revisit
later, too.

BTW, without dates, uptimes.txt seems like it can only be used for such
massive stats, not for tracking actual problems when the load was high.
Does it have another purpose?  Could do a date>> to the file once a day.

Thanks,
Karl

  17231 13
  17063 14
  16591 15
  16577 12
  16356 18
  15024 17
  13095 16
  12981 23
  12082 11
  12008 03
  11941 19
  11812 05
  11793 21
  11283 22
  11131 04
  10595 00
  10589 02
   9948 01
   9105 20
   7250 10
   6561 09
   5940 06
   2848 08
    844 07