What is Load Average (LA)?

Load Average (LA) is a metric that shows the average system load over a specific period of time. It usually displays three values, representing the average load over the last 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

The load is measured by the number of processes that are in the running state or waiting to run (for example, in the CPU queue).

Example: if you have a 4-core processor, and the Load Average is 4, it means the system is fully loaded. A value above 4 indicates that there are more processes than available cores, and some processes are waiting in the queue.

Load Average helps to understand how loaded the system is and whether there are bottlenecks in performance.