Once upon a time CPU utilization was quite a useful metric. Following are the output of several tools that provide CPU utilization metrics:

top

top reports a load of 1.66.

Is this correct? No. The correct load number is probably closer to 2.4.

# top -b -n 1| head -20
top - 11:27:45 up 151 days,  1:55,  7 users,  load average: 1.66, 1.84, 1.88
Tasks: 389 total,   3 running, 386 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us, 20.6%sy,  1.2%ni, 77.3%id,  0.1%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.1%si,  0.0%st
Mem:  32639636k total, 32206476k used,   433160k free,   235732k buffers
Swap: 16359420k total, 10285664k used,  6073756k free,  2354840k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
16702 root      20   0 8274m 5.0g 5.0g S 85.1 16.1  59164:55 VirtualBox
 4657 root      20   0  9.8g 5.2g 5.1g S 45.5 16.6  26518:13 VirtualBox
 6239 root      20   0  9.8g 5.1g 5.1g S 39.6 16.5  31200:52 VirtualBox
27070 root …

If you were to measure MySQL’s “loadavg,” how would you do it?

The following metric (in pseudocode) is borrowed from Trevor Price at Aggregate Knowledge. It’s a way to calculate average query response time. What do you think of it?

$start = microtime(); $status1 = SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE Questions; for ( 1 .. 100 ) { [...]