I've written before about how university IT is peculiar and convoluted . Now,courtesy of the UC Berkeley Campuswide Information Strategic Plan2004-2005, comes a lovely description of this complicated environment:its Campus IT Plan: Critical issue 5: Governance, funding,structure section.(Other sections of the report are also interesting; I've got somereading to do.)

I'm pretty sure you could reuse that section more or lessas-is to describe the University

It turns out that a lot of web spiders crawl my website here, andbecause I read my web server logs more than the average monkey I'vegotten to see a number of web spider mistakes over and over again.These mistakes are so common that it's a rare day when I don't seeat least one of them in the logs.

(These are mistakes as opposed to stupid spider tricks because they are so clearly wrong by the basic rules of HTTP.)

So, stupid web spider

The iostat manpage documents %iowait as:

Show the percentage of time that the CPU or CPUs were idle duringwhich the system had an outstanding disk I/O request.

It turns out that the manpage is wrong, which I found out by reading thekernel source because I was curious about what exactly it measured.

The actual definition of %iowait is the percentage of the time thatthe system was idle and at least one process was waiting for disk IO tofinish . (This is true for both the 2.