is it normal to have a load average of 1 on a dual cpu box, even though the CPU is at 99-100% idle? I dunno about normal, but it's not necessarily indication of a problem load average of 1 just means there's 1 process in the run queue it is on openbsd now some change in how kernel threads are counted OpenBSD's load average metric changed. (also on Linux, load average is not just CPU usage) it can be disk I/O and other I/O as well linux's load average going up is normally disk the number of processes in D state each add 1 to the load average at least that tends to be what it is ime with modern cpu's it is harder to be cpu bound at least enough to lead to checking out a high load average Would the Thunder cloud contribute to the load average Disk being network rather than local it shouldn't be too bad running a lot of processes at once that wait on disk i/o will increase the number