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Date: Sun, 24 May 2009 20:22:37 +0200 (CEST)
From: Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
To: Scott Bennett <bennett@cs.niu.edu>
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Cc: Yuri <yuri@rawbw.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: How can this 'top' command output make sense? Load over 7 and
 total CPU use ~5%
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>     From the glossary (p. 630) of _The_Design_and_Implementation_of_the
> _FreeBSD_Operating_System_ by McKusick and Neville-Neil:
>
> 	load average  A measure of CPU load on the system.  The load average
> 		in FreeBSD is an average of the number of processes ready to
> 		run or waiting for short-term events such as disk I/O to
> 		complete, as sampled once per second over the previous one-
> 		minute interval of system operation.
>
so this glossary should be fixed because it's nonsense.

first - says that it's measure of CPU load
then - "or waiting for short-term events such as disk I/O" - which is NOT 
measure of CPU load.