Re: [despammed] Re: [RFC] [PATCH] [2.5.35] Run Queue Statistics

[Lev Makhlis <mlev@despammed.com>]

On Monday 16 September 2002 11:08 pm, Rik van Riel wrote:
> On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, Anton Blanchard wrote:
> > On a semi related note, vmstat wants to know the number of running,
> > blocked and swapped processes. strace vmstat one day and you will see it
> > currently opens /proc/*/stat (ie one open for each process) just to get
> > these stats.  Yet another place where the monitoring utilities disturb
> > the system way too much.
> >
> > Can we get some things in /proc/stat to give us these numbers? Does
> > "swapped" make any sense on Linux?
>
> Runnable can be done currently, blocked on IO is trivial once
> Andrew has pushed the iowait stats to Linus.
>
> Swapped doesn't make any sense at the moment, but it should.
> A system without load control is just too vulnerable to sudden
> load spikes. If Andrew has interest I'll pick up the work I
> did in that area ...
>
> I'll also update vmstat to just use /proc/stat instead of
> looking at all /proc/*/stat files.
>
> cheers,
>
> Rik

Amusingly, the number of running processes can be found in
/proc/loadavg, of all places, right now.