Monitoring load average - healthy figure?

[Chuck Swiger]

Jamie wrote:
>      I've googled the results, and I've seen a couple posts from people
> who claim that the general rule of thumb is that your load average should
> be less than the number of CPU's. I don't know what OS they were referring
> to, however. Does this sound right for FreeBSD? Are there better ways of
> monitoring load average?

If the load average is greater than the # of CPU's, your machine is CPU-bound 
and tasks are waiting to get processor time.

If that's because the machine is a busy server, one ought to add more 
resources or rebalance the load.  If this happens because you're running a 
screensaver or setiathome, you probably don't care.  :-)

I use a warning system which notifies me (via email) if the 5-minute load 
average on one of my servers goes too high, which I've set at 2.5 for 
single-proc machines, 4.5 for dual-procs, and 7 for the single quad-proc box 
I've got.  YMMV.

-- 
-Chuck