System monitor: what does "Load average" exactly cover ???

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi,

In the system monitor, at the top of the "Processes" tab, it says:

" Load averages for the last 1, 5, 15 minutes: 0.09, 0.16, 0.18 "


Gnome is supposed to be user friendly, simple, intuitive and all
that ;-) so I thought the meaning of these numbers, the definition of
that "load" should logically spring to the average joe's mind in a
couple seconds maximum, right ?! ;-)
That's the problem: after nearly 4 years of using Ubuntu/Gnome, I still
haven't found an easy/logical explanation to these ridiculously low
numbers, that never seem to get past 0.50 nevermind 1.00.

Usually by "system load" one refers to CPU load, but that can't be
that, as the figures should rather be two orders of magnitude higher
than that.

So my question is: does anyone know for sure what these tiny "load"
numbers represent exactly ? How are they calculated ?

I understand/think that Gnome's system monitor is just a front end to
"top" and so uses this information "as is", so I guess that's half an
excuse ;-)
So I wandered in the top man page, but couldn't find a definition of
that "load" average either.
The help page of gnome System Monitor doesn't explain this point either.

I intend to file a bug report on g-s-m as I find this is a usability
problem considering gnome's philosophy, or at least suggest to give a
detailed explanation in their help page. But before I do that, I would
really like to know, out of curiosity, how this load figure is put
together.

Maybe a mix of CPU + RAM + swap space + network B/W ? 

In the meantime, I will try digging into top's source code to see if I
can understand anything from it...


--
Vince, curious :-)