Take the tour ×  My machine has 4 cores. And my load average is
about 1.2 Does with means that all cores are more than busy? Or
is the real load of my machine? 1.2 / 4 = 0.3 In other words is
this machine overloaded of not?  share|improve this question add
comment  2 Answers  up vote 7 down vote accepted  Think of it a
load threshold of 1 per physical core. 1.2 means you're
averaging just over 1 CPU being pegged out of 4 available.
Seeing a load of 4 or greater would be a better indication of
being overloaded.  share|improve this answer Once thing I din't
mention is that the 4 cores are virtual. This machine is running
within KVM. Still the same thing? –  ddofborg Dec 24 '11 at
19:40 Yes. Same thing. However, if 1.2 is representative of your
regular load, you may want to consider scaling back your virtual
CPUs to 2 instead of 4. –  ewwhite Dec 24 '11 at 19:55 Use top
at the command line, and then press 1 with it on screen. This
will tell you the loading on each core, virtual or real. 1.2
could be a 50/20/20/3