Load Avarage graph pattern

[Robert K. Stodola]

In article <14081 at dog.ee.lbl.gov> torek at elf.ee.lbl.gov (Chris Torek) writes:

>In article <MEISSNER.91May31111801 at curley.osf.org> meissner at osf.org
>(Michael Meissner) writes:
>>Another thing could be the activity to run the various xclock
>>programs, and such.  I would imagine that on timesharing systems with
>>lots of xterms, this could be significant.

	[Much very interesting text deleted here.  Thanks Chris!]

>The solution is simple but requires relatively precise clocks. ...

One of my associates and I did a study of this a number of years ago (actually
it was with a PDP-11/70 running IAS).  We found that there was substantial
clock synchronized usage on the system.  The solution we found didn't require
very precise clocks at all.  Simply one whose rate was relatively prime to
the system clock.  We got very good results using a clock at 5x.y Hz (don't
remember the exact speed, but was a strange one in the 50's) on a system
driven off a 60Hz clock.  This was adequate to desynchronize the sampling
rate from the system rhythms.  Because it was a slow clock, it didn't add
much load to the system, but did gave an adequate statistical picture of
individual usage and load.