Kloadavg

Abstract

A load index is a metric typically provided by the operating system (OS) to characterize the workload state of a computer system. The load indices proposed in the literature so far, as well as the ones provided by modern operating systems, are able to capture only the system's load at user level. However, we know from theory and practice that runnable entities, executed at kernel level, may interfere significantly on user-level applications. In this paper, we discuss and propose a kernel-level load index, which is evaluated experimentally under different controlled workloads, in comparison with the load index provided by the OS. The results confirmed that the OS' native load index was unable to capture kernel-level workloads, in contrast to our proposed index that shows accurate results for different workload types at kernel level.