[plug] Load (overloading...)

[Tim White]

Being the bored Year 12 student that I am I decided to see how much 
impact a couple of hundred, cpu intensive, processes would do. While 
playing around I noticed that the load meter on my gnome bar was getting 
higher than I had ever seen. It actually got to 100% but that seems to 
be a lie. As further testing revealed some staggering load numbers. 
After being used to a load of .6 to 2.5 I thought that I must be around 
5 or something. Not so according to /proc/loadavg and uptime. So after 
writing a few scripts that would allow me to continually spawn processor 
intensive processes simulatenously, and monitor the load, number of 
these particular process, etc... and a 'relief valve' so that I could 
return my system to its current 0.65 loadavg, I discovered to my horror 
that I could load the system way beyond my expectations.
So what exactly is load? Well I orginately thought it was a percentage 
similar to CPU usage but I'm not to sure anymore.
What is the maximum load? That I also do not know.
During my testing the loadavg got to 232.64, with 234 CPU intensive 
processes. From this I could infer that the loadavg is the # of active 
processes. Would I be correct?
Just looking for some enlightenment and showing off what my 667Mhz P3 
can do[1].
BTW, I was very impressed with the way linux handeled the system under 
such high load. I could still use terminals fine (X was a little bit 
touch but still running) the slowest part was actually starting the 
screen session at login (due to my .bashrc automatically opening a 
screen session)

Tim
[1] I had seen people talking about servers with high loads and the 
numbers where VERY small compared to mine