Performance question

[Alan Fiebig]

>You want to be looking at the 'b' column not the 'r'.

Ah, earlier I thought you literally meant the leftmost column, thanks for straightening
me out! No wonder it looked so bad :)

My 'b' column is usually '0' or '1', sometimes at 3-6 but only for an instant.

So I guess I'm okay on that front.

With children at 5 and syslog off:
  load now is:     10.76, 8.07, 7.55
  system time is:  40%-50%

My idle time is way low, less than .5%, so I assume that this means my
processor is now always able to both find something to do, and to actually do it.

Before, when I had high idle time, it was not due to a lack of work for the processor,
but rather a lack of resources to do it. In the case of linux, lots of idle time
coupled with there being a lot of work not getting done is indicative of a problem, in my
case it is my disk IO apparently.

What should the system time percentage be at on a well tuned system? What's my target?

-Alan