The load average shows the load on the CPU over three different time intervals, one minute, five minutes and fifteen minutes. These are displayed on the Processes tab above the process list, and are an indicator of system processing capacity.

The load is the number of processes currently running plus the number of processes queued to run on the system's CPU(s). A load showing a utilization of 100% would be roughly 1.0 times the number of CPUs or cores in the system; load averages constantly hitting this number would indicate that the system is fully-loaded with no processes waiting for processor time. Lower numbers indicate that the system's processing power is sufficient for the processes being run, while numbers that are consistently higher might mean more processing power is needed.

Three intervals are shown so that spikes and trends in the numbers can be taken into account: if the load average spikes higher in the one- or five-minute intervals, but settles down below the 100% mark over the fifteen-minute interval, system processing capacity is probably sufficient.