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Load

lastmod 2025-12-05created 2018-02-0717 edits

In UNIX computing, the system load is a measure of the amount of computational work that a computer system performs. The load average represents the average system load over a period of time. It conventionally appears in the form of three numbers which represent the system load during the last one-, five-, and fifteen-minute periods.

Summary

Load indicates the state of processes waiting to be processed. In other words, Load Average represents the average of tasks (Task; Process) waiting to be processed by the CPU.

  • Load Average is the average number of Active Tasks (TASK_RUNNING, TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE).
    • R (Running) - The state of running on the CPU or being runnable.
    • D (Uninterruptible Waiting) - The state of waiting for I/O, meaning it cannot do anything else.
  • Usually outputs averages over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.
  • Generally, if the Load Avearge value is lower than the number of CPUs (cores), there is no problem, but this may vary depending on the situation.
    • Taking 1 per CPU core as the baseline, a value above 1 means there is waiting time for processing processes, and below 1 means processing has headroom.
  • As with other monitoring data, it is better not to judge system load by Load Average alone.

How to check

  • uptime
    • e.g. 10:09:52 up 1:19, 3 users, load average: 0.82, 0.64, 0.57
  • top
  • cat /proc/loadavg

For reference, to check the total number of CPU cores: 

grep -c processor /proc/cpuinfo

See also

Favorite site

References

  1. Lunatine.net_-_Load_Average.pdf ↩

  2. How-to-check-single-server-load-average.pdf ↩

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