Comment 40 for bug 574910

Load average is just a number. Aside from your "accounting errors" there are fundamental performance issues. How they relate I do not know. Since none of the "usual suspects" except for load average show up as issues (disk i/o, network i/o, memory swapping, etc) for me to troubleshoot (or kill -9).

When my AMD Athlon(tm) II X2 250 system with 4GB or ram and mirrored SATA drives running a gust vm of 10.04 (512MB) and the guest 10.04 system has less performance than my Sparc 10 (128MB) did in 1999 I would call that odd. My other guests running 9.04 and 9.10 are running fine. (Stop me if written this before)

If it is pure accounting errors, tell me what I should tune in my system to make the performance better and I will check it out. Once my system is running fine, I can ignore load average as I would a broken indicator on a instrument panel. As of right now I have no data to even go on to "tune" my system other than load averages going "wonky" for no apparent reason on idle systems.

Seriously? You think all of us are having a conniption over a number rather than performance? I am getting the impression that the people form Ubuntu think this is not an issue. Or that we are "dreaming" about our performance issues. I think I have documented my issues reasonably well considering I am using "live" systems rather than test VMs. I didn't do an FDA approved 'blue book' series of tests like I have in other jobs I have had but I did the best I could given the fact I have a day job to attend to.