Load average

[Justin Gruenberg]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 9:50 PM, Hernandes Sousa
<hernandes.sousa at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I was taking a look at the uptime command and saw the load average.
> I've been looking around and saw that how this gets calculated is
> quite a mistery, all I know is that it's based on the average
> processes queue (by measuring processes state and I/O). Could anyone
> please clarify a bit more?

Wikipedia does a pretty good job explaining (or, better than I would).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)#Unix-style_load_calculation

> What about a good number to keep it under? (I've read that it should
> be kept under 1, but as I don't understand the whole thing I'm not
> sure).

Ideally, the load average would be less than the number of processors you have.