Hello nisp,

The load average is a representation of how busy you CPU core is in percent. It
goes from 0 to 1, where 1 means that, in a simplified way, every cycles of the
core is being used. If you have more than one core, then the average of each
core are added to give you your system average (you can consult it at
/proc/loadavg). So if you have a load average of 5 with a 6 cores cpu, it means
that your system does a lot of work but not overworked. If it stays at 5 when
the computer is idle, then there's something wrong.

Here's what the man page say about 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 numbers
> separated by a slash (/). The first of these is the number of currently
> runnable kernel scheduling entities (processes, threads). The value after the
> slash is the number of kernel scheduling entities that currently exist on the
> system. The fifth field is the PID of the process that was most recently
> created on the system.

So, what is the maximum load average for your machine? There isn't one. The
right thing to know is if your machine is constantly in high load, and if so
what causes that. If you have a low ram amount and a decent swap, it may means
that your computer is swapping all the time which induce a bottleneck at the I/O
level. If your load average exceeds the amount of core, it means that whichever
tasks are running can't be completed in a timely fashion.

After a quick search, it seems that the ThinkPad T480s fields with a 4 core
intel processor. So your load average would be way above the hardware
capabilities of the machine. I would advise changing your desktop environment to
something lightweight.

Cheers,
                 Ludovic

On Sat, 06 Jul 2024, nisp1953 via Dng wrote:

>Hi Folks:
>
>Another question here. What is the max load average I can run on my
>laptop? I am using Devuan 5.0 on a Lenovo T480S Thinkpad.
>
>Right now htop is showing 4.95 for the 5 minute average.