I was looking at the load on a couple machines at work today. I did it by looking at /proc/loadavg. For those wondering, that's a special file on Linux systems which has information in it about how busy the machine is. You can access it programmatically, by hand, or with whatever and see the load average. Its contents look like this:

[wee@lazlo wee]$ cat /proc/loadavg
0.47 0.16 0.05 2/118 5661

The first three numbers are measures of CPU utilization for the last 1, 5, and 10 minute periods (these are what you see when you run uptime or w). The last two sets of numbers mean... I don't know what they mean. I never really had to look at them before. So I got curious, looked around the web for a bit and finally found out what they mean.

Turns out that the fourth set shows the number of currently running processes as a fraction of the total number of processes. The last set shows the last process ID used.

That's pretty much it, really.