[gnome-system-monitor/mallard-help: 24/30] process-loadaverage

[David King <davidk src gnome org>]

commit 62368a69fea4ac4bb5c3b3d197e487a059d15a08
Author: Mike Hill <mdhillca gmail com>
Date:   Fri Sep 16 07:57:20 2011 -0400

    process-loadaverage

 help/C/process-loadaverage.page |   26 +++++++++++++++++++-------
 1 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 7 deletions(-)
---
diff --git a/help/C/process-loadaverage.page b/help/C/process-loadaverage.page
index affdd8c..67c9aae 100644
--- a/help/C/process-loadaverage.page
+++ b/help/C/process-loadaverage.page
@@ -11,7 +11,8 @@
       <years>2011</years>
     </credit>
 
-    <desc>The <em>load average</em> tells you how much work your computer has been doing over the past few 
minutes.</desc>
+    <desc>The <em>load average</em> tells you how much work your computer has
+ been doing over the past few minutes.</desc>
   </info>
 
   <title>What is the load average?</title>
@@ -21,12 +22,23 @@
     <p>Explain how to interpret the load averages quoted on the Processes tab.</p>
   </comment>
 
-  <p>Short introductory text...</p>
+  <p>The <gui>load average</gui> shows the load on the CPU over three different
+ time intervals, one minute, five minutes and fifteen minutes. These are displayed
+ on the <gui>Processes</gui> tab above the process list, and are an indicator of
+ system processing capacity.</p>
 
-  <steps>
-    <item><p>First step...</p></item>
-    <item><p>Second step...</p></item>
-    <item><p>Third step...</p></item>
-  </steps>
+  <p>The <em>load</em> is the number of processes currently running plus the
+ number of processes <em>queued</em> to run on the system's CPU(s). A load
+ showing a utilization of 100% would be roughly 1.0 times the number of CPUs or
+ <link xref="cpu-multicore">cores</link> in the system; load averages constantly
+ hitting this number would indicate that the system is fully-loaded with no
+ processes waiting for processor time. Lower numbers indicate that the system's
+ processing power is sufficient for the processes being run, while numbers that
+ are consistently higher might mean more processing power is needed.</p>
+
+  <p>Three intervals are shown so that spikes and trends in the numbers can be
+ taken into account: if the load average spikes higher in the one- or
+ five-minute intervals, but settles down below the 100% mark over the
+ fifteen-minute interval, system processing capacity is probably sufficient.</p>
 
 </page>