[tlug] load average as reported by uptime

["Jean-Christian Imbeault" <jean_christian@example.com>]

What exactly is the load average reported by uptime? A quick search seems to 
indicate that it is:

"the system CPU load (as the number of jobs in the run queue) averaged out 
over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes."

But on my server, which has about 350 processes running, I get the following 
numbers:

# uptime
  6:42pm  up 82 days,  2:37,  1 user,  load average: 0.12, 0.09, 0.09
# ps -aux | wc -l
    362

I can't quite believe that with 362 processup the load average over the last 
minute was only 0.12 ... that would mean less than one process per minute 
was active ...

Obviously I am not quite grok what "load average" really means ;)

Can someone help me out?

Jc



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