Andrew Gillham said:

>An essentially idle system should not be sitting at 0.54 load.  That means
>that half the time a process is running.  While that doesn't directly
>translate to 50% cpu utilization, it seems high.

It's not that easy to speculate. For instance, newsyslog could have been
running. Also, typing 'ls' a few times quickly followed by 'w' will show
a rise in cpu load, but it falls off in seconds. I just tried this on
NetBSD/i386, NetBSD/sparc, Solaris 2.6 & 2.8, and SunOS 4.1.1.

Back around NetBSD 1.2 there was a lot of discussion about this.
-- 
Rick Kelly  rmk@rmkhome.com  www.rmkhome.com