[wellylug] Load average statistics dubious

[C.T.F. Jansen]

Greetings,
I used to use a number of different unix OS's and the load average
statistics on them is an artificial number and often with values too
different with what is actually happening on the system. It was regarded
as a joke and people warned not to use it.
top and ps generate worthwhile numbers. There are several performance
monitoring packages out there now and as freeware. Installed some from
the Debian DVD set after a reading an article in a recent issue of the
"Linux journal". Do an aptitude search on a the Debian packages or have
a look at sourceforge and freshmeat. Google has web address details.
The ones listed in the linux journal included :

iostat in sysstat
lsof
iotop
nagios
ganglia
zabbix

They're all on the Debian DVD set so they're also all down loadable from
the internet somewhere.
I was particularly interested in iowait and similar monitoring. Its
taken quite a while for the linux/unix community to catchup with the
adequate mainframe perfomance monitoring software.
The linux journal author preferred nagios. I installed and started 
setting it up. There's quite a lot to it. Beware that it will install
apache and samba for you as well ! The notebook here has had apache and
samba disabled. It has a daemon running in the background which seems
well set up. Its designed to monitor several machines on a network.
Good luck.

Cheers,

frank.jansen at actrix.gen.nz