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by dibarra 5530 days ago
By the way, simply put, load averages are computed based on the number of processes in contention for the CPU, and are calculated based on a single CPU average. So, a load of 70 means 70 processes were in contention of the CPU, meaning the system is overloaded by 7000% (assuming the server had only one CPU core.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_(computing)