Highest load you've ever seen
 

Just for fun, whats the highest load you've seen on a system without a system crash? I just saw this on a 4 core server at work yesterday

http://williams-andrew.com/IMG_0152-edit.JPG

OK, I saw 86, and thought "well that does beat the 70 we currently have on some very very highly critical MQ servers" but... sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

On Linux a high loadavg isn't necessarily an indication of high system load.
With a number like that I'd be looking for dodgy software parking threads in uninterruptable sleep and forgetting about them. Could also be a disk I/O problem, but I'd reckon you'd find out about that soon enough.

It was a faulty load balancer configuration that sent all of the traffic to one node out of 10. It was actual load, not software problems.