Any one explain about Load average in uptime command

Linux
#1

Any one explain uptime load average
when we type uptime. It shows

21:59:59 up 1 min,  2 users,  load average: 2.31, 0.72, 0.25

Currently am logged in only single user, But it shows 2 users. How?
At the same time i can’t able to understand load average in 3 levels such as 2.31, 0.72, 0.25.
Any one explain detaily…

#2

21:59:59 is the current time
1 min: The system has been up for 1 minute
2 users: No of users logged in,you see two users because some user accounts belong to system.When you launch a child process in bash you may also see it as a different user logged in.You can use the following commands to check logged in users.

who

w

To see unique users logged in use

who | cut -d’ ’ -f1 | sort | uniq

or

id -un

Load average:The system load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes respectively. Assuming you have one CPU on your system.Your numbers will mean:
over the last 1 minute: The computer was overloaded by 131% on average. On average, .31 processes were waiting for the CPU. (2.31)
over the last 5 minutes: The CPU idled for 28% of the time. (0.72)
over the last 15 minutes: The CPU idled for 75% of the time. (0.25) on average.
The calculation will be different for multi-core CPU.

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#3

Hi Jose,

Thank you for the explanation. I would like to know if I have 2 core or 4 core how to know how much load is there ?

Regards,
Raj

#4

Hi,

Use top command and press 1 you will see cpu usages per core.

Regards,
Sepahrad

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