What is "load" in System Load Indicator?

Solution 1:

Short summary from two different sources.

From en.wikipedia.org/

The load average represents the average system load over a period of time. It conventionally appears in the form of three numbers which represent the system load during the last one-, five-, and fifteen-minute periods.

[...]

An idle computer has a load number of 0. Each process using or waiting for CPU (the ready queue or run queue) increments the load number by 1. Most UNIX systems count only processes in the running (on CPU) or runnable (waiting for CPU) states. However, Linux also includes processes in uninterruptible sleep states (usually waiting for disk activity), which can lead to markedly different results if many processes remain blocked in I/O due to a busy or stalled I/O system.[1] This, for example, includes processes blocking due to an NFS server failure or to slow media (e.g., USB 1.x storage devices). Such circumstances can result in an elevated load average, which does not reflect an actual increase in CPU use (but still gives an idea on how long users have to wait).

[...]

For single-CPU systems that are CPU bound, one can think of load average as a percentage of system utilization during the respective time period. For systems with multiple CPUs, one must divide the number by the number of processors in order to get a comparable percentage.

From man uptime

System load averages is the average number of processes that are either in a runnable or uninterruptable state. A process in a runnable state is either using the CPU or waiting to use the CPU. A process in uninterruptable state is waiting for some I/O access, eg waiting for disk. The averages are taken over the three time intervals. Load averages are not normalized for the number of CPUs in a system, so a load average of 1 means a single CPU system is loaded all the time while on a 4 CPU system it means it was idle 75% of the time.

To answer the original question, it is the load average for the past 1 minute.

Solution 2:

This means system load, check these resources:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)
• https://serverfault.com/questions/67759/how-to-understand-the-memory-usage-and-load-average-in-linux-server
• https://superuser.com/questions/23498/what-does-load-average-mean-in-unix-linux
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/33203/how-does-load-average-work-with-modern-cpus
• http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9001