Record High Load Average

[Bent Hagemark]

In article <1704 at ucsd.EDU> brian at ucsd.EDU (Brian Kantor) writes:
>A few years ago our Vax-780 'sdcc3' set the netwide load average record
>high of 128 (and may still hold it for a single-processor Unix system).
>
>Yesterday we got our network connections unjammed and our mail gateway
>'UCSD' set what I think may be the record for a Vax-750: 85.3.  And this
>is on a machine which has NO users, just sendmails.  Thank goodness
>we're getting some faster hardware in soon.
>
>Truly a frightful experience.
>
>	Brian Kantor	UCSD Office of Academic Computing
>			Academic Network Operations Group  
>			UCSD C-010, La Jolla, CA 92093 USA
>			brian at ucsd.edu ucsd!brian BRIAN at UCSD


A few years ago now we were testing some mail system software
which put the load on the 11/750 we were using at the time
(since retired) well over 100.  I don't recall the exact
load average, but do remember that it was more than 2 digits
(to the left of the ".") as we used some load average utility
that assumed that the load would never be greater or equal
to 100.

The test involved 20 different machines to each send 20 messages through
this 750 simultaneously (or as simultaneous as one can do something
like that).

Lots of sendmails seem to like to find their way into the run
queue! :-)