what does uptime's load average mean

Aragorn

I do not think it is a percentage. IIRC, it is the number of entries in the run queue; i.e., the number of processes that could run if there were a processor. It depends on his machine. Like you, my machine has two hyperthreaded Xeons and is just about idle, and the numbers, below, are mostly four BOINC processes running at nice 19 (i.e., least likely to run; just there to soak up idle processor time). If I look at top or xosview, I notice the processors are almost 100% loaded:

08:55:30 up 12 days, 19:26, 5 users, load average: 4.22, 4.21, 4.18 171 processes: 166 sleeping, 5 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle total 8.8% 386.8% 3.6% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu00 2.8% 94.6% 2.3% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.1% cpu01 2.2% 97.2% 0.4% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu02 3.6% 95.5% 0.7% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% cpu03 0.1% 99.6% 0.2% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% Mem: 4100844k av, 4056828k used, 44016k free, 0k shrd, 142564k buff 3160684k actv, 589320k ind, 66704k inc Swap: 8193076k av, 0k used, 8193076k free 3132340k cached

As you can see, I have a lotta RAM for a desktop, and have not been doing much paging lately.

-- .~. Jean-David Beyer Registered Linux User 85642. V PGP-Key: 9A2FC99A Registered Machine 241939. ^^-^^ 08:50:00 up 12 days, 19:20, 5 users, load average: 4.14, 4.17, 4.16