Can someone explain to me what the three 'Load Averages' figures in WHM actually mean?

I understand that the higher the figures, the higher the load, but what do the figures actually represent, and why are there three of them?

Thanks

Neil A

Assuming it is a direct representation of that from the "uptime" command at a terminal it is the load averages over 1 minute, 5 minute and 15 minute intervals.

I'm not quite sure what they actually represent however.

Ok. I've done some digging around for you.

From the man page:

"System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptable state. A process in a runnable state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in unin‐terruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for disk.

The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of CPUs in a system, so a load average of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time."

Nick

Thanks very much Nick, that's all really helpful.

I admit, I couldn't find much searching around the cPanel site, so I appreciate you finding that material.

Cheers

Neil A.