My understanding of load average lead me to be quite shocked with my current system. The CPU in my workstation is an i7 with hyperthreading enabled, and cat /proc/cpuinfo
produces 4 'cpu's.
That all given, my PC can generate over a 16 in all the load average slots from 1 minute to 15 minutes while compiling packages for Gentoo, but still be working perfectly for all other tasks as well. I've even seen it as high as 24, though it was starting to slow down at that point. How does this work, if 1.0 is supposed to represent one core at full utilisation?