Implement getloadavg on Windows. Fixes #604 and #1484 (#1485) (patch by Ammar Askar)

2 files changed, 24 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/docs/DEVNOTES b/docs/DEVNOTES
index c54fa938..abd2e368 100644
--- a/docs/DEVNOTES
+++ b/docs/DEVNOTES
@@ -69,8 +69,6 @@ FEATURES
 
 - #613: thread names.
 
-- #604: emulate os.getloadavg() on Windows
-
 - scripts/taskmgr-gui.py (using tk).
 
 - system-wide number of open file descriptors:
diff --git a/docs/index.rst b/docs/index.rst
index 85429eb6..1469e61b 100644
--- a/docs/index.rst
+++ b/docs/index.rst
@@ -238,6 +238,30 @@ CPU
 
     .. versionchanged:: 5.5.1 added FreeBSD support.
 
+.. function:: getloadavg()
+
+    Returns the average load on the system over the last 1, 5 and 15 minutes
+    respectively as a tuple. The load represents how many processes are waiting
+    to be run by the operating system.
+
+    On UNIX systems this relies on `os.getloadavg`_. On Windows, this is
+    emulated by using a Windows API call that spawns a thread which updates the
+    average every 5 seconds mimicking the UNIX behavior. Thus, the first time
+    this is called and up until 5 seconds it returns a meaningless
+    ``(0.0, 0.0, 0.0)`` tuple.
+
+    Example:
+
+    .. code-block:: python
+
+       >>> import psutil
+       >>> psutil.getloadavg()
+       (3.14, 3.89, 4.67)
+
+    Availability: Unix, Windows
+
+    .. versionadded:: 5.6.2
+
 Memory
 ------
 
@@ -2556,12 +2580,6 @@ FAQs
   the Python script as a Windows service (this is the trick used by tools
   such as ProcessHacker).
 
-----
-
-* Q: What about load average?
-* A: psutil does not expose any load average function as it's already available
-  in python as `os.getloadavg`_.
-
 Running tests
 =============