On a Chinese forum, someone talked about "load average".
Do you think my load average was on the high side when UnionTech OS was idle?
https://storage-bbs.chinauos.com/thr...439605_top.jpg

I think my CPU usage was normal when the system was idle:
https://storage-bbs.chinauos.com/thr...013118_CPU.jpg

Source: https://bbs.chinauos.com/en/post/149...0&postId=68287

Load average is misleading, it is really the queue delay on processing which can reflect real CPU load, memory, or process queue issues. If it has not climbed above 5 during hot processing (under stress) then no worries. IF it hits 8 or 9 you have to have a close look at what is going on, you DO have a problem. If it is in the 0-3 range that is pretty normal.


What things can push it up will depend upon your specific hardware, configuration, and usage.

I always thought, if your load average is less than your CPU cores, then everything funning at full speed. If its higher than your number of cores, then your cpu is the bottleneck.

It climbed above 6 while scanning was in progress.

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from my side, the three numbers next to that load average do not mean a lot. Also you cannot compare hosts to check if it is good enough or not. I would rather go from the other direction. Based on your own experience you can collect some data (let's say yesterday 10 was ok, so it will be ok today too).
I would recommend you to ignore it and use idle time instead (3rd line: %Cpu, .... 25.9 id). If it is too low (< 10) your host is busy, and may slow down.

It makes sense to monitor the system load.
The sum of the compute-CPUs is a good alert threshold for load.
If the load is caused by computation then this threshold is precise - all CPUs are saturated.
If the load is caused by something else then there is congestion elsewhere.
I remember a dozen applications were frequently locking files on NFS; the NFS server couldn't keep up; the application processes went to D state, and the load was about the sum of the D states. Thanks to the load alert this was brought to light, could be analyzed, and finanally the application was fixed.

The load average climbed to 9.12 when I was watching an online video.
I saw nothing wrong with my PC, though.

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