Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index Load averages are a measure of the amount of processing a computer system is currently performing, usually in the form of a scalar and as some variation on a percentage. They come in different forms in the cases of differing operating systems. On Unix and Unix-like systems the load average is generally given as three scalar numbers, representing the average number of processes ready to run in the last one, five and fifteen minutes. On Windows systems, a percentage of CPU load is generally used, with 100% being full CPU utilization. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.