load average

The three figures at the end of uptime: one, five and fifteen minute averages of how many processes are running or waiting for their turn. Not a percentage — there is no ceiling of 100 — and the count includes processes waiting on disk, not only on CPU, which is why a load of 8 appears quite happily on a machine whose processor is idle and whose storage is saturated. On its own the number says nothing. load average: 3.42, 2.10, 1.05 is headroom on the 4 cores nproc reports; on a single core the same figure means everything is queuing. Read the three together for direction: that one is rising, the reverse order would be a spike already passing. An alert threshold copied from another machine tells you nothing about this one.