loadavg()

Async\loadavg() — 1/5/15-minute load average. POSIX; returns null on Windows.

loadavg ​

(PHP 8.6+, True Async 1.0)

Async\loadavg() returns the system load average over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes, or null if the platform does not support load average (Windows).

Description ​

php
namespace Async;

function loadavg(): ?array

Load average is the average length of the kernel run queue. It is a different metric from CPU utilisation: on a 4-core machine a steady load of 4.0 means the run queue is, on average, fully populated.

Return value ​

array{0: float, 1: float, 2: float} — [1min, 5min, 15min]. On Windows the function returns null.

Examples ​

Example #1 Basic usage ​

php
<?php
use function Async\loadavg;

$load = loadavg();
if ($load !== null) {
    printf("Load average: %.2f %.2f %.2f\n", $load[0], $load[1], $load[2]);
} else {
    echo "Load average is not available on this platform\n";
}

Example #2 Overload alert ​

php
<?php
use function Async\spawn;
use function Async\delay;
use function Async\loadavg;
use function Async\available_parallelism;

spawn(function () {
    $cpu = available_parallelism();
    while (true) {
        delay(60_000);
        $load = loadavg();
        if ($load === null) continue;

        // 5-minute load above the number of available CPUs = sustained overload.
        if ($load[1] > $cpu) {
            error_log(sprintf(
                "[WARN] sustained load %.2f (5min) > %d CPUs",
                $load[1], $cpu
            ));
        }
    }
});

Notes ​

Load average ≠ CPU usage. A high load on a machine with light CPU usage usually means an I/O-bound workload (processes stuck in D-state on disk/network). For CPU assessment prefer cpu_usage().

Windows. There is no load-average concept in Windows (it is a BSD/Linux thing). The function returns null — intentionally, with no emulation.

See also ​