What is Load Average

Understanding what is load average can be very confusing when you read man pages and other documents. So here is my understanding about load average.

Think about a bridge from where 100 cars can pass through at a time. So in load average context 100 processes can process at a time.

Now if there are only 50 cars going from that bridge that means 100:50 Now load average is .50 if there are 150 cars than 50 cars will be waiting to pass through that bridge in that context load average will 100:150 ie. load average of 1.50.

Hope it is clear in a single processor context. Now what if we have dual core processor or quad processor. In our example lets talk about quad processor.

Now there are 4 bridges which a capacity of 100 cars each bridge. In this context if have 150 cars coming than load average will be 1. This might be confusing as i think there are static calculation methods . Average will still come as 1.5 but now  we still have spare capacity of 250 cars. So it would be fine to have load average of 1.5 which was not good in case of a single core processor.

In a quad core processor it is fine to have a load average anything below 4 , but can be a problem if it goes above 4 as that will means more than 400 cars for a bridge with capacity of 400 cars.

so why don't we have some standard for load average without looking at number of CPU's my machine, I don;t know about this as of now, but will post the same here.