Take the 2-minute tour ×  I have an box I built out of some
parts I have around my office.  I used an old Intel Core CPU
(not core2) @2.0ghz with 2 cores.  The box is running Ubuntu
11.10 64-bit server edition, it serves as my iSCSI target for
VMware. The box also has ZFS running on it, I am using the ZFS
on Linux build.  To my point...  When I copy things from the old
storage to the new storage (this box) the load averages in top
shoot WAY high up. I think the highest I saw was 15.01.  Is that
bad for a dual core?  Is it bad in general?  Shouldn't the load
stay under 2.0 for a dual core?  Or is it okay for it spike like
that as long as it does not stay constant. Because the constant
load average when the server is mostly idle is about 0.15 ->
0.30. Which sound more normal to me.  Any insight?
share|improve this question add comment  2 Answers  up vote 3
down vote accepted  According to wikipedia the load average is
the 'exponentially damped/weighted moving average' of the load
number, which is the number of