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A System Load Monitoring Trilogy
Leor Zolman
If you've been following my articles in the past two
issues of Sys
Admin, you've probably noticed that one of my big concerns
as system
administrator here at R&D Publications has been
to seek out new and
useful ways to smooth out the CPU system load on our
single-CPU Xenix
installation.
The overnight and background job spooling utilities
described previously
allow our users a great degree of direct control over
their use of
system resources. From time to time, the users must
make decisions
such as whether to launch a long series of reports in
the background
or to run them overnight, instead. Most of our users,
however, are
not technical enough to comfortably use the standard
UNIX/Xenix diagnostic
utilities to get a handle on the system load. Without
a tool to translate
the load figures spewed by programs such as uptime into
plain
English, those users would lack the information on which
to make job
scheduling decisions.
To address this problem, and to assist me in gauging
the effects of
various efficiency-related system policies and tools,
I have developed
the set of shell scripts described in this article.
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