Finding Load average on Linux

Load Average of a Linux server can be find in various ways and they are shown below.  The 3 values which it displays are the system  load averages for the past 1, 5, and 15 minutes.

 [root@S3 ~/]# uptime

 07:18:07 up 57 days,  8:04,  8 users,  load average: 1.82, 1.24, 0.97

[root@S3 ~/]# cat /proc/loadavg

1.67  1.22  0.97  1/283 24487

 [root@S3 ~/]# w

 07:18:19 up 57 days,  8:04,  8 users,  load average: 1.56, 1.21, 0.97

USER     TTY      FROM              LOGIN@   IDLE   JCPU   PCPU WHAT

adevaraj pts/0    gtlslhh.tcprod. 01:41    0.00s  0.10s  0.03s sshd: adevaraju [priv]

tkhalef  pts/3    gtwash01.tcprod. Mon05   45:35   0.38s  0.03s sshd: tkhalef [priv]

nimmika  pts/4    220.10.245.82   05:49    1:28m  0.02s  0.02s -bash

[root@S3 ~/]#

[root@S3 ~/]# top

top - 07:19:14 up 57 days,  8:05,  8 users,  load average: 1.57, 1.28, 1.00

Tasks: 284 total,   1 running, 281 sleeping,   0 stopped,   2 zombie

Cpu(s):  2.2%us,  0.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 95.9%id,  1.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st

Mem:  16634296k total, 14157704k used,  2476592k free,   438604k buffers

Swap:  5406712k total,       56k used,  5406656k free, 12835252k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

21914 apache    15   0     0    0    0 Z  7.7  0.0   0:02.06 httpd <defunct>

24774 root      15   0  2508 1072  720 R  3.8  0.0   0:00.02 top

20504 apache    15   0 50596  24m 4800 S  1.9  0.1   0:03.89 httpd

    1 root      15   0  2072  616  532 S  0.0  0.0   0:08.33 init

.

.

.

.