Systems are either unused or overloaded. The load average value describes the total load on the running system. It describes the average number of runnable processes, processes with all resources except CPU time slices, on the system.

Load average is reported by the uptime and top commands. It is reported with three values. The first value indicates the average in 1 minute, the second indicates the average in 5 minutes, and the third indicates the average in 15 minutes.

It is reported by uptime:

    $ uptime
    12:40:53 up  6:16,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00