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The load is a count of the number of processes waiting on the run queue. So if the 5 minute load average is set to 7, that means that for the last 5 minutes there have been an average of 7 processes on the kernel scheduler's run queue. At any given time, most processes are not actually running; they are blocked waiting for I/O or some other event. When several processes need to run at once, the kernel picks one process to give to the CPU and saves the others in a list until the CPU becomes available. The load averages are telling you how backed up the kernel's list has been.
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