On Wednesday 09 June 2004 09:39, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> In article <20040609093416.GD23269@drowsy.duskware.de>,
>
> 	Martin Husemann <martin@duskware.de> writes:
> > On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 09:19:22AM +0000, Matthias Scheler wrote:
> >> load averages:  1.43,  1.27,  1.17                                    
> >> 11:16:43 123 processes: 2 runnable, 120 sleeping, 1 on processor
> >
> > 2 runnable processes - so expect some load.
>
> But the CPU was 99% idle.
>
> > For whatever value of "properly".
>
> I wouldn't expect a system idleing more than 90% of the time to report
> a load above 1.

As I documented a while back, currently anything blocked on pipe I/O counts 
against the load average, because sys_pipe.c uses PRIBIO instead of PSOCK.  I 
changed this quite a while ago in my local source tree.