What do the numbers in /proc/loadavg mean on Linux?

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When issuing this command on Linux:

# cat /proc/loadavg
0.75 0.35 0.25 1/25 1747

The first three numbers are load averages. What are the last 2 numbers?

The last one keeps increasing by 2 every second, should I be worried?

linux
5 Answers

The following page explains these in detail:

http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2017-08-08/linux-load-averages.html

Some interpretations:

  • If the averages are 0.0, then your system is idle.
  • If the 1 minute average is higher than the 5 or 15 minute averages, then load is increasing.
  • If the 1 minute average is lower than the 5 or 15 minute averages, then load is decreasing.
  • If they are higher than your CPU count, then you might have a performance problem (it depends).
user_15161160

You can consult the proc manual page for /proc/loadavg :

$ man proc | sed -n '/loadavg/,/^$/ p'
       /proc/loadavg
              The first three fields in this file are load average figures giving the number of jobs in the run queue
              (state  R)  or waiting for disk I/O (state D) averaged over 1, 5, and 15 minutes.  They are the same as
              the load average numbers given by uptime(1) and other programs.  The fourth field consists of two  num‐
              bers  separated by a slash (/).  The first of these is the number of currently runnable kernel schedul‐
              ing entities (processes, threads).  The value after the slash is the number of kernel scheduling  enti‐
              ties  that  currently  exist  on  the  system.  The fifth field is the PID of the process that was most
              recently created on the system.

For that, you need to install the man-pages package on CentOS7/RedHat7 or the manpages package on Ubuntu 20.04/22.04 LTS.

user_56496390
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