Re: Load average

On Wed, 2 Oct 1996, Philip Hazel wrote:

> It was suggested that I add the ability to limit incoming SMTP calls
> when the load average is high.
[...]

> The point of the post, however, is to ask a question. The code for Sun,
> IRIX and HP-UX request an "open" operation on a kernel "file" and a
> subsequent "read" to get the data. Root privilege is required for the
> open. The natural way to implement this in the Exim daemon is to do the
> open at start-up time, and hang on to the resulting descriptor for ever
> more. Does anybody know of any reason why this is a bad plan?

If you want to be portable across multiple revisions of kernel, won't
you need to have access to a kernel symbol table (namelist) to find
out where the load average is kept?

Austin