Load average is an age-old metric, which is in existence since the 1970s to indicate whether the system is under heavy/average/low load.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. Load average is an age-old metric, which is in existence since the 1970s to indicate whether the system is under heavy/average/low load. It is useful to indicate whether the system’s load is on an increasing trend or a decreasing trend. In this article, let’s learn more about ‘Load Average.’ In most cases, ‘Load Average’ is reported as an average of 1 minute,5 minutes, and 15 minutes. Please refer to the below screenshot: The 1-minute load average is 6.00. The 5-minute load average is 5.48. The 15-minute load average is 3.25. It’s hard to say whether the ‘Load Average’ is high, normal, or low without knowing the number of CPUs present in the system. You can find out the number of CPUs in the system through one of the approaches given here. In the above example, we saw a 1-minute load average of ‘6.00.’ Suppose the above system has just 1 CPU, then it indicates ‘Load Average’ is quite high on this machine. It means this system is processing 600% load at the last minute. We derive 600% because: = (Load Average / Number of CPUs) x 100 = (6.00 / 1) x 100 = 600% Thus, the system is 500% overloaded more than the capacity it can handle. Say suppose the above system has 12 CPUs, which means ‘Load Average’ is normal. Since the 1-minute ‘Load Average’ is ‘6.00,’ it means only 50% of the compute capacity is utilized. We derive 50% because = (Load Average / Number of CPUs) x 100 = (6.
