Load is generally a measure of a single processor core utilization over an kernel dependent time range.
Generally as others have pointed out being a very broad (not as in meadow, as in continent). Different OS's report load very differently from each other today. Traditionally you would see a load average of 1-2 on a multicore system (I am talking HP-UX X client servers etc of the early 90's vintage). a Load average of 1 means a single core of the system is being utilized close to 100% of the time. On dual core systems a load average of 1 should be absolutely no cause for concern. Linux has moved away from reporting load average as a percentage of a single core time in recent days for precisely this reason, people see a load of 1 and think there systems are esploding. In the traditional mold todays processors should in theory get loads of 4-7 and still be responsive... On 31 May 2011 19:10, Joel Carnat <[email protected]> wrote: > Le 31 mai 2011 ` 08:10, Tony Abernethy a icrit : > > Joel Carnat wrote > >> well, compared to my previous box, running NetBSD/xen, the same services > >> and showing about 0.3-0.6 of load ; I thought a load of 1.21 was quite > much. > > > > Different systems will agree on the spelling of the word load. > > That is about as much agreement as you can expect. > > Does the 0.3-0.6 really mean 30-60 percent loaded? > > As far as I understood the counters on my previous nbsd box, 0.3 meant that > the > cpu was used at 30% of it's total capacity. Then, looking at the sys/user > counters, > I'd see what kind of things the system was doing. > > > 1.21 tasks seems kinda low for a multi-tasking system. > > ok :)
