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I'm wondering I always see my load average on my computer, 1.76,1.31,1.08 at the moment. What does it mean ?
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The general rule of thumb is that the load average shouldn't exceed the number of processors in the machine. If the number of processors is four, the load should generally stay under 4.0. Keep in mind that this relates to logical processors instead of the actual physical ones on the CPU.
Surprisingly to many Mac users, there is no recommended percentage of CPU usage. But obviously, the higher the usage, the slower your Mac performance will become. If the CPU usage is edging around 100%, your Mac is trying to do more work than it has the capacity for.
A high load average indicates the server is busy. As long as your server and applications are performing as expected, you don't need to worry too much about it. The load average values should be within 75% of the number of CPUs. If a server has 4 CPUs, then 75% of 4 is 3.
So, your CPU load should ideally stay below 1.00. Also, like the bridge operator, you are still ok if you get some temporary spikes above 1.00 ... but when you're consistently above 1.00, you need to worry.
If your CPU were a hot dog stand, the load averages would tell you the average number of people standing in line to get served. A load of less than 1.0 means that the hot dog vendor has some spare time between customers -- 1.0 means that, while a line never piles up, some customer is always talking to the vendor (who knows where all the hot dogs are going...). Having a "low" load average doesn't mean that your computer isn't doing anything though, there could be customers who take a really long time to eat their hot dog before getting in line again (that is to say some process might be waiting on the disk or network to wake them up with some data when it arrives), having a faster disk or net connection could improves your total dog sales.
Enjoy.
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