The CPU Load Average value represents the number of processes that are using the CPU, waiting to use the CPU, or waiting for I/O access.
A load above 3 is expected on the CPM and it is a normal state. Unless the value is significantly higher than 4 or the CPU utilization is high, nothing abnormal is happening.
CPM system utilization can be verified with following Unix commands:
1. utilization of CPU using top command
[[email protected] admin]# top
top - 07:48:27 up 1 day, 17:09, 2 users, load average: 3.78, 3.72, 3.72
Tasks: 161 total, 1 running, 160 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 2.4%us, 7.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 88.8%id, 0.9%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 3592316k total, 2377432k used, 1214884k free, 326244k buffers
Swap: 1003896k total, 0k used, 1003896k free, 1366960k cached
PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
1 root 18 0 10352 740 616 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.99 init
2 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 migration/0
3 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.62 ksoftirqd/0
4 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/0
5 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:13.65 migration/1
6 root 34 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:20.46 ksoftirqd/1
7 root RT 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 watchdog/1
8 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.02 events/0
9 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 events/1
10 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.05 khelper
11 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kthread
16 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kblockd/0
17 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.30 kblockd/1
18 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cqueue/0
19 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 cqueue/1
20 root 16 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/0
21 root 16 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata/1
22 root 18 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ata_aux
25 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 khubd
27 root 10 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kseriod
157 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:09.92 pdflush
158 root 15 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:01.91 pdflush
159 root 14 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kswapd0
160 root 15 -5 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 aio/0
2. I/O statistics with iostat command to check if system does a lot of I/O operations:
[[email protected] admin]# iostat 5 3
...[cut]...
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle