Quote:
If your load average, N, is always less than 12, then there's no reason for the OS to use N/12 of each processor when it can just fill N processors and leave the others idle.


I don't know how AIX works, but both Solaris and Irix normalize the load average by the number of processors, where Linux doesn't. In other words, a four processor Linux box is is working as hard as it can when the load average is 4, but a 4 proc Sun box would report the same workload as 1. Enough work to max out a single CPU would be reported as 1 on Linux and 0.25 on Solaris.

--Nathan