Linux load average and other silly metrics
Talk by Franck Pachot. Link to the details in the Reference section.
The talk starts with the saying the load is often misunderstood.
He shows a classic example of io wait with high load, low cpu. Lots of processes in D state, this can lead to high load.
You can lower the io wait percentage by running ‘yes’. Well, it simply means that the cpu is no longer only waiting on io.