System Load or System Load Average
It is run-queue i.e a queue of processes waiting for a resource(cpu, i/o etc.) to become available .
Consider a single-core cpu as a single lane of traffic with bridge and process as cars.
Now in this situation System load is
- 0.0 – If there is no traffic on the road.
- 1.0 -If the traffic on the road is exactly the capacity of bridge.
- More than 1 – If the traffic on road is higher than the capacity of bridge and cars have to wait to pass trough the bridge.
This number is not normalized according to your cpu. In Multiprocessor system, load 2 mean 100 % utilization of we are using dual-core processor, load 4 means 100% utilization if we are using quad-core.
You can get your system load using
uptimecat /proc/loadavgtop$uptime 22:49:47 up 11:47, 4 users, load average: 2.20, 1.03, 0.82
Here the last three number representing the system load average for 1, 5 and 15 minutes respectively.
The example above indicates that on average there were 2.20 processes waiting to be scheduled on the run-queue measured over the last minute.
