Testing for Server MAX load

[Rick Stevens]

Waldher, Travis R wrote:
> Is there a utility to test for the max load you can place a server
> under?
> 
> By load, I mean what top returns at the top line.

Or "uptime".  The "load" is made up of a number of things and each
of those affect the load in different ways.  For example, if you have
a lot of processes stuck in IO wait states (ps would show them in a
"D" state), that'll up the load significantly.  Lots of network
connections (especially those in FIN1 states) will affect the load.
Not as much as "D" processes, but a lot.

Lots of context switching also affects load, as will swapping if you
run out of memory.

For example, due to a problem we've been having with a SAN system here,
I had a web server with about 300 stalled apache processes ("D" state).
The load on the system was 1722.6 (dual proc Xeon, 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM).

That enough load for you?
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
- If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate -
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