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I'm observing a high load average an certain machine (about 9) in all three load fields. I understand load as the number of processes in state "run" / currently desiring CPU time. Am I correct at reasoning that if N processes are running on my machine this cannot produce a load greater than N?

Also, does the load count in respect to processes or threads? In other words, can a multithreaded process produce a load greater than 1?

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Note that (because they're usually expected to be scheduled very soon), tasks in the "uninterruptible" state are also counted as running. Just a detail, not something that changes your question. – mattdm♦ Mar 17 '11 at 14:43

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The numbers that are used to calculate load average are tasks in the run or uninterruptable state and the amount of work done in the time slice of the moving average. These tasks can be part of a multithreaded process. The fields are fuzzy the farther back in time due to smoothing results from the algorithm used.

A load of 1 is equal to 100% of one CPUs worth of work. If you had a multithreaded application that managed to have a number of active threads in excess of the number of available CPUs, then you could have a single process drive the load above 1. This would likely be a short term spike and not reflected in the longer time slice views of the load average.

Also, since the load average was developed before there were multi-core systems, its important to divide the load numbers by the total available number of cores. If this is a sustained load of 9 on a 4 socket quad core system, then this is a 9 of 16 load and not really a problem.

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— I've yet to see a system where multiple cores on a socket are exposed up to user-space in a way which makes them look like anything but more CPUs. So in top, on the 4-socket quad-core system, 16 CPUs are seen. (So one can readily see that the load of 9 is below the number of CPUs.) – mattdm♦ Mar 17 '11 at 18:48
I understand that the numbers are logarithmic, so they are just under or above 1. One system I have, I saw the system report this: load average: 10.41, 9.57, 9.26 . What?? Why would one linux system report load average: 0.81, 1.57, 0.98 whereas this system reports load average: 10.41, 9.57, 9.26 ? Are all unix's not the same on this? – djangofan Jun 20 '11 at 21:56
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Load average is usually described as "average length of run queue". So few CPU-consuming processes or threads can raise LA above 1. There is no problem if LA is less than total number of CPU cores. But if it gets higher than number of CPUs, this means some threads/processes will stay in queue, ready to run, but waiting for free CPU.

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