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Systems & Data Center · Intermediate

Load Average

The average number of processes running or waiting for CPU or uninterruptible I/O over 1, 5 and 15 minutes on Linux.

Definition

Load average is reported by uptime, top and /proc/loadavg. It should be interpreted relative to the number of CPU cores: a load of 8 on an 8-core server is roughly full utilization. Linux includes processes waiting on disk I/O, so high load can reflect storage bottlenecks.

Example

uptime shows 'load average: 12.03, 9.87, 6.21', indicating rising load.

Exam tip

Compare load average to core count; also check iowait because Linux load includes I/O-blocked processes.

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