StatsDawg

This graph displays the system's load average as it commonly referenced by the 'top' and 'uptime' commands. The load average is the average nuumber of processes competing for the CPU versus how many are able to run over 1 minute, 5 minutes, and 15 minutes respectively. A good rule of thumb is that a system which is perfectly utilitized will have a load average around the number of CPUs on the system. For single CPU systems, the optimum load average would then be 1. Anything above this number means that the CPU was unable to keep up with the demand of processes wanting use of the CPU and other resources, which in turn means that some processes had to wait a bit longer to be able to accomplish their tasks.

That said, just because a system is under a load average of 3 or 4 does not mean the system is under a very heavy load by itself. It is simply one indicator which can hopefully help determine the root cause of the issue. In general, however, load averages above 10 do constitute a generally bogged down system.