[adamt]

> Load average measures how long is the queue of processes waiting for the CPU

I don't think that's quite right.

Load averages measure the size of queue of processes runnable and waiting for CPU or disk.

If you ever have a webserver/cache that has disks that have become the bottleneck, you can often get to a high load (lots of runnable processes, blocked on disk) but low CPU util (everything is blocked on disk, CPU relatively idle).

In my experience high UNIX load on busy systems is far more caused by disk IO utilisation rather than CPU utilisation.

E.g. if you run "du -s / &" 4 times, you can watch your UNIX load go to 4 (after 1 minute), but you will have idle CPU time. This will be more obvious if you have slow magnetic disks rather than a fast SSD.